How to choose brand colors and fonts that fit your business

You need a color and a font. You open a color picker, find four hundred blues, and close it again. Two weeks later your sign writer needs an answer today and you pick one in thirty seconds.

Here is how to choose brand colors and fonts you will still be happy with in three years, in about an hour, without any theory about what purple means.

How many colors does a small business need?

Three, and only one of them is a real decision.

• A main color. Yours. It goes on the logo, the sign, the van, the headings.
• An accent color. Used sparingly, for buttons and anything you want clicked or called.
• A dark neutral for text. Near black, not pure black, because pure black on white is harsh on screens.

White space counts as part of the palette. Most small business designs that look cheap are not badly colored, they are too crowded.

How do you pick the main color?

Start from what already exists. If you have a van, a sign, a uniform or a logo you like, the color is chosen already, and matching it is worth more than improving it.

If you are starting clean, pick by the job you need it to do:

• Look established and safe: deep blues and greens. Common in trades, medical, legal and finance for a reason.
• Look warm and personal: earthy oranges, terracotta, warm reds. Fits food, salons, childcare, anything hands on.
• Look premium: very dark neutrals with one restrained accent. Charcoal, ink, deep green.
• Look different in your town: look at your five nearest competitors. If four are blue, do not be the fifth blue.

Then check it works. Put your color next to white and read some small text in it. If it is hard to read, it stays a background color and your text stays dark.

How do you choose fonts?

Two, at most. One for headings, one for everything else. Many businesses do fine with a single font used at different weights.

Use Google Fonts, which are free, load fast and work everywhere. Safe pairs that suit almost any small business:

• Poppins headings with Inter body. Modern, friendly, very legible on phones.
• Playfair Display headings with Source Sans body. A little more upmarket.
• Montserrat headings with Open Sans body. Plain, sturdy, hard to get wrong.

Rules worth keeping: body text at sixteen pixels or larger, never set long paragraphs in a script or handwriting font, and never use more than two families. Most amateur looking design is a font problem, not a color problem.

Where do people get this wrong?

Not in the choosing. In the not writing it down. The colors drift because the sign writer matched by eye, the printer used a different mix and whoever built the website guessed.

Write one page and keep it where you can find it: the hex code for each color, print values if you print, the two font names, and what each is used for. That single page is what makes a small business look consistent, more than the choices on it.

Can you do this yourself?

Yes, genuinely. Pick your color, pick a font pair from the list above, write them on one page, and use them for everything from that day forward. That puts you ahead of most of your competitors, and it costs nothing.

Where people call us is when there is nothing to build on: no logo, or one that only exists as a low resolution image somebody made years ago and the original file is gone. If that is you, our logo and brand design runs $950 and covers the logo in proper files, the colors and the fonts, written down.

Target Marketeer builds and runs marketing for small businesses nationwide, based in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the most common branding job we do is not a redesign, it is making one existing look consistent everywhere.

Quick answers

How many colors should a brand have?

Three: a main color, an accent used sparingly for buttons and calls to action, and a dark neutral for text. More than that gets inconsistent quickly.

What are the best fonts for a small business?

Free Google Fonts cover nearly everyone. Poppins with Inter, Montserrat with Open Sans, or Playfair Display with Source Sans. Use one for headings, one for body, and nothing else.

Do brand colors really matter?

Consistency matters more than the specific colors. A business using one color everywhere looks more established than one using a slightly nicer color inconsistently across its sign, website and invoices.

What is a hex code and why do I need it?

A six character code like #283071 that names a color exactly. Without it, every printer, sign writer and web designer matches by eye and your brand slowly drifts apart.

How much does branding cost for a small business?

A logo alone typically runs a few hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on the designer. A full brand identity with guidelines costs more. Choosing colors and fonts yourself and writing them down costs nothing and gets you most of the benefit.

Once you have them, the work is using them everywhere, which is what why your logo needs to look the same everywhere is about, and whether business cards still work covers the printed side. Our branding and design services page shows what a full identity includes.