Expanded Company Color Palette Proposal

Word came from several executives that they wanted our company color palette to have a lot more variety, and to use one of our large, national competitor's identity as inspiration. A few members of the design team were asked to come up with proposals for expanded color palettes. I used principles of basic color theory to develop my proposal.

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The five-color corporate palette I used as a starting point. These colors have been in use for most business units in the company, excluding Individual and Medicare Products.

Above left: much like I did for the Provider Communications palette, I placed the three complementary colors where they would fall on a standard color wheel. This was my starting point.

Above right: in Adobe Illustrator, using the official Pantone CMYK builds of my three main colors, I used the blend tool to determine the exact halfway points between each of the main colors, and then did it again between the main colors and the halfway points, giving me a full, 12-color color wheel. Then, I visually matched Pantone book colors to their CMYK and RGB on-screen builds, going back and forth between looking at the swatch book, the Illustrator file, and the swatches on the Pantone website. This was the final "true hue" palette.

Above left and center: after determining the final "true hue" palette, I then had to determine each color's shade and tint. For the shades, I took my existing "true hue" palette in Illustrator, and placed a 50% black "multiply" screen over each shape. I then repeated the process of matching book colors to those on screen in both Illustrator and on the Pantone website. For the tints, I took the "true hue" wheel, set its opacity to 50% in Illustrator, and then once again matched book, to screen, to website to get my 12 tints.

Above right: the entire 36-color palette in one convenient graphic.

Part of my proposal was to tell not only the executives, but the other designers, how they could use and make sense of this, admittedly gigantic color palette. My proposal was simple: it's up to the designer to figure out what colors they want to use on any given communication, as long as they use basic color theory to choose a harmonious palette on our new company color wheel. How each individual designer uses the colors in those color palettes is up to them. The way we'd build and maintain the visual identity is through consistent use of type, photos, and logo treatments.

The images above are a few proposed, individual palettes for use on marketing communications, determined by using basic color theory and the proposed color wheel. In order from left to right: an analogous palette; a monochromatic palette (which is technically also an analogous palette here); a complementary/split-complementary palette; and a triad palette.