Personal Brand Colour Strategies for Enduring Growth and Alignment

Deciding on your brand colour palette can feel like the hardest part of the branding process. It’s particularly hard for personal brands. I know because I’ve designed dozens of personal brands and recently rebranded my own brand with another designer.

As a personal brand, you want your colour palette to reflect your personality because you are the brand. But what about your ideal clients? A recurring hurdle I help personal brands overcome is designing a brand colour palette that balances personal taste with audience interest. Here’s what you need to know about designing a personal brand colour palette that your ideal clients can’t resist.

CONTENTS

• The personal branding colour conundrum

• Finding brand colours that speak to you and your audience

• Testing your personal brand palette functionality

The Personal Branding Colour Conundrum

Every individual has a series of colours they naturally gravitate towards. There are the colours we like to surround ourselves with in our homes and the colours we look best wearing.

When building a personal brand, it makes sense to select colours that feel deeply connected to your identity. That alignment allows you to show up authentically—because if you don’t like your brand colours, operating your business feels friction-filled and exhausting.

Here’s the catch: your favourite colours alone won't grow a business.

Colour preference is highly subjective. The hues you love don't automatically trigger the right feeling or meaning for your target audience.

Herein lies the personal branding colour conundrum.

It’s very hard to detach from your personal preferences when branding your business. Yet, your brand identity exists to easily capture the attention of your ideal clients. Factoring in all the pieces of your brand identity, colour is the fastest vehicle to do this.

What this means is your brand palette can’t be based on your preferences alone. It needs to factor in the emotional needs and desires of your target audience.

Finding Brand Colours that Speak to You and Your Audience

For your brand colour palette to feel good to you while also attracting those most likely to hire you, the first thing it needs to do is balance these two objectives:

1. Reflect your brand personality

2. Meet their emotional needs

For personal brands like coaches or copywriters who work one-on-one with clients, this balance is particularly critical. Your brand colour palette helps set the tone and personality expectation for what it’s like to work with you. It’s likely what will draw them to you in the first place.

If your brand palette is soft and subdued but your actual personality is more bold and outspoken, this will lead to a lot of mismatched client relationships. And it’s unlikely you’ll realize your colour palette is to blame.

The question you want to ask yourself is: do my preferred brand colours represent the same emotional connotations that my target audience is looking for?

Here’s how you figure it out.

Your personality palette and their emotional desire palette need to overlap.

Does the colour psychology align?

On one side you have a list of your preferred colours that represent you in your mind and identity. These should both:

• Capture your personality

• Be colours that you’d want to use everyday

  
  

On the other side you have a list of the emotional needs of your ideal clients.

• What are they feeling in the moments leading up to hiring someone like you?

• What feelings are they aiming to feel from hiring someone like you?

Look up the colour psychology associated with your list of colours. Compare those to your audience’s emotional goals. Is there enough of a natural overlap or will you need to make a strategic compromise?

Sometimes this overlap will happen naturally. The brand palette for life coach, Melissa McCullough, is a great example of this.

A snapshot of the common psychological associations for her personal brand colours

Melissa personally gravitates to pastels and neutral tones. In fact, she was wearing a close shade of this soft purple on our strategy call. Here is how we balanced her personal preferences with client strategy:

Personality Palette:

• Warm & Inviting: Oranges + light neutrals

• Intuitive & Empathic: Purple + pink

• Calm & Peaceful: Greens + warm neutrals

Emotional Palette:

• Current state: sensitive, open-minded (purples and soft hues)

• Seeking from Coach: safety, comfort, empathy (greens, purples, light neutrals)

• Desired outcome: hope, freedom, optimism (oranges and warm neutrals)

Colour psychology isn’t an absolute rule for branding

It’s worth mentioning that you do not need to exclusively choose colours that have aligned colour psychology associations. Context and cultural nuances matter, but branding should also be creative enough to break away from the status quo when it serves a purpose.

In crowded industries, choosing unexpected colours can be an effective way to stand out. So long as the choice is driven by strategic intention, not just "because I like it best.”

This is why working with a professional on your brand will reveal strategic opportunities that are hard to identify from within your own business.

Related: The Easy Guide for Creating a Brand Colour Palette

Testing your Personal Brand Colour Functionality

The last, very critical step for designing an aligned personal brand colour palette is testing how those colours perform together in practice. Swatches might look gorgeous side-by-side on a mood board but fail across actual graphic assets.

There are two final checks you want to test for before signing off on a brand palette:

1. Tonal contrast check

2. Combination range check

Testing for Tonal Contrast

You may love a colourful palette but if each of those colours have a similar tonal value they’ll never have enough contrast to read a heading on your website for instance.

Tonal value is simply the lightness or darkness of a colour without any saturation. The eye needs more tonal contrast for different colours to work and be legible together.

In the image below, you can see how the colour palette itself is lovely. But when you desaturate the colour, most share a similar tonal value.

When you remove the chroma you see how much contrast actually exists

How to test them:

Test the colours by typing your brand name in each of the colours and placing it over every colour as shown in the grid below. If text is hard to read, you need more tonal variation. In the example below, you see that the light neutral is the only colour that really works with other brand colours because it has the most contrast.

If web accessibility is a priority, take the hex codes and add them to this Colour Contrast Checker to see if your colours meet web accessibility standards.

In this example, the lack of tonal variety limits legibility

To avoid this problem, use my Colour Palette Framework as you decide upon your personal brand colours:

• Signature colour: this will be the colour most iconic to your brand identity

• Complement to signature colour: this can be a true complement (opposite on the colour wheel) or a light or dark variation of your signature colour

• White or light neutral: this can be white, a warm neutral (think vanilla), or cool neutral (think pale grey)

• Dark anchor: this guarantees contrast and can be your dark signature hue or a very deep grey

This framework leads to a well-balanced colour palette, designed to work for your brand identity.

Testing for Sufficient Colour Combination Range

If your personal brand colour palette passes the contrast check, see how many usable brand colour combinations you have to work with. Using the same colour palette grid technique from above, you can quickly see how many usable combinations you will have.

Here’s why this is important: if you only have one or two colours that work well together—like in the earlier grid example) you will be limited by colour and have a boring brand identity.

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How to test them:

To truly test this, apply your brand colours to a variety of social templates. How much colour versatility do you really have when applied to creative assets? If you find you have to keep using the same two colours, you’ll want to make some final refinements to your personal brand colour palette.

Unless there’s a strategic reason for having two signature colours you use exclusively, you will quickly become bored of your brand identity and end up rebranding sooner than intended.

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Building a personal brand colour palette isn't just about picking colours that look aesthetically pleasing. It’s an exercise in balancing your personal identity with strategic visual psychology. When you get that formula right, your brand’s visual identity feels effortless to show up in and effortless for ideal clients to say "yes" to.

If you are feeling stuck navigating the line between personal taste and strategic positioning, you don't have to figure it out alone. Working with an experienced brand designer takes the guesswork out of the process, ensuring your personal brand is built on both beauty and strategy from day one. Join me for an intro call and let’s tailor a personal brand identity that truly feels like you and works for your business.

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Jenny Henderson is a brand designer and strategist for B2B businesses. Her collaborative approach blends imagination and insight to create memorable brands that perform strategically and support real business growth.

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