How to choose brand colours and fonts that feel like you

This is the process I use with clients before I design a single page. You can do most of it yourself with a notebook, a free afternoon and a bit of honesty about who you’re really for.

Your brand isn’t really for you. It’s for the person scrolling past at 10pm wondering whether to book. So before you open Pinterest, write down who your ideal client is. Age range, roughly what they earn, what they’re worried about, what they’d be happy to spend on themselves.

Then pick three or four words for how you want them to feel when they land on your website or walk through your door. Keep them specific. “Nice” and “professional” don’t help much, because everyone wants those.

Take a facialist whose words are “clinical but calm”. Her clients might be women in their forties who’ve been sold products they didn’t need elsewhere. They want someone who knows the science, but they don’t want to feel like they’re sitting in a hospital. Those words give you a clearer brief than any mood board.

Now compare a yoga teacher by the sea who wants “grounded, warm, unhurried”, or a lash artist who wants “soft, girly, a little bit luxe”. You can already picture three very different brands from those words alone.

Once you have your words, look at eight to ten businesses near you that offer the same thing. Screenshot their websites and Instagram grids and put them side by side. You’ll usually spot a pattern quickly. In aesthetics it’s often white, gold and grey. In lashes and brows it’s a lot of blush pink. In wellness, everything seems to be beige and sage at the moment.

You don’t have to do the opposite of everyone, but you do want to be recognisable. If your feed sits in a client’s phone next to four others that look identical, nobody remembers which one was yours.

You’ll find plenty of articles saying blue means trust, green means health and red makes people hungry. I’d take all of that with a pinch of salt. How people react to colour is personal and cultural, and it changes with context and fashion. White means purity in some places and mourning in others. A shade of green can look fresh on a skincare brand and dated on a kitchen.

What does matter is how colours work together and whether they suit your feeling words. A pale, warm palette with plenty of space around it feels calm to most people because of how it’s used, not because of some hidden rule about the colour itself. So trust your eyes and your clients’ reactions more than a chart.

A good brand colour palette is smaller than most people expect. You need four or five colours in total, and they each have a job:

As a rough guide, designers use the 60-30-10 rule: around 60% of what people see is your dominant colour (for most beauty brands, the neutral base), around 30% a secondary colour, and around 10% accent. On a calm, airy website I often let the neutral take even more than 60% and use the main colour more sparingly. It isn’t a law, but it stops the page looking like a box of sweets. If your accent colour starts creeping into every heading and every button, it stops being an accent.

These are only examples to show how the pieces fit together. Hex codes are the six-character codes you’ll use on your website and in Canva. I’ve checked each one for contrast, because soft brand colours rarely work as button colours straight out of the mood board, and most palettes need one deeper “working” shade for buttons and links.

A clinical skin clinic. Cool and clean, with one warm note so it doesn’t feel cold. A soft off-white base (#F6F5F2), a deep slate for text (#2E3438), a muted blue-grey main colour (#6E8591) and a warm sand accent (#C9B79C). It says “we know what we’re doing” without shouting. White text on that blue-grey doesn’t quite reach the contrast needed for button text, so I’d add a deeper blue-grey (#56707D) for buttons and links, and keep the sand for shapes and backgrounds only.

A soft lash studio. Pretty but grown up. A warm cream base (#FBF6F2), a soft cocoa for text (#4A3B36), a dusty rose main colour (#D4A5A0) and a muted champagne accent (#E6D3BE). Swapping bright baby pink for a dustier rose is often all it takes to make a lash brand feel more expensive. White text on dusty rose is far too faint, but cocoa text on a dusty rose button passes comfortably. The rose and champagne are too pale for text on cream, so use them for blocks of colour, not words.

A grounded wellness space. Earthy and warm. A linen base (#F3EEE6), a dark olive-brown for text (#3B3A2F), a sage main colour (#8A9A7B) and a terracotta accent (#B9785A). The terracotta stops the sage feeling flat. For buttons, deepen it to a burnt terracotta (#96573D) so white text on it is easy to read, as neither white nor dark text quite passes on the lighter shade.

Colours behave differently depending on where you see them. Before you commit, try them out properly:

This is the bit that gets skipped most often, and it matters. Pale text on a pale background might look lovely on a mood board, but it’s hard to read, especially for older clients and anyone with low vision.

The web accessibility guidelines (WCAG) set minimum contrast ratios. For the AA level most websites aim for, normal text needs at least 4.5:1 against its background, and large text (roughly 24px, or about 19px in bold) needs at least 3:1. Button edges, form field borders and icons that people need to see should reach 3:1 as well. Free contrast checkers let you paste in two hex codes and tell you whether they pass.

In practice, keep your body text dark, keep your backgrounds light, and check every pairing you’ll actually use, especially button text on your main colour. Soft pinks, sages and golds usually fail as text colours on cream, even at heading size, so save them for shapes and backgrounds, and add a deeper shade of your main colour for buttons and links if you need one.

Fonts carry as much personality as colour, sometimes more. The simplest approach is two fonts:

Serif fonts have the little feet and flicks on the ends of the letters, like you’d see in a magazine or a book. They tend to feel classic, editorial or luxurious. Sans serif fonts don’t have them, so they look cleaner and more modern. Most of the beauty brands I design pair an elegant serif for headings with a simple sans serif for body text, because it gives you warmth and clarity together.

For the “clinical but calm” facialist, I’d reach for a fine, light serif for headings and a crisp sans serif for everything else. The “grounded, warm, unhurried” yoga teacher could go the other way, with a soft rounded sans serif for headings and a gentle serif for body text, which feels more like a well-loved book. Whichever you choose, check the body font at 16px on your phone. Fine, light weights that look elegant in a heading often turn spindly and hard to read in a paragraph.

Two fonts is plenty. A third usually makes things look busy, and a script font as well as two others almost always does. If you want variety, use different weights of the same font, such as light and medium.

Before you fall in love with a font, check you’re allowed to use it on your website. Many fonts are free for personal use but need a paid licence for business or web use, and that catches a lot of people out. Google Fonts is a good free option. Its FAQ confirms the fonts can be used commercially, mostly under the SIL Open Font License, and you’re allowed to download them and host them on your own website, which is how I prefer to set them up for speed. If you buy a font elsewhere, check the licence covers web use as well as desktop and print, as these are often sold separately.

Choosing your colours and fonts is half the job. Using them the same way every time is the other half, and it’s what makes people recognise you before they see your name.

Once that’s done, carry the same look through everything: your website, your booking page, your aftercare cards, your emails. If you send newsletters, my guide to email design for salons shows how to keep them on brand when most inboxes won’t show your brand fonts.

You can get a long way on your own with this, especially at the start. If you’re just setting up, my guide to starting a beauty business from home covers the rest of the groundwork.

It’s worth bringing in a designer when you’re putting your prices up and want your brand to match, when you’ve been tweaking your colours for months and nothing feels right, or when your website no longer reflects the business you’ve built. If that’s where you are, it’s something I do as part of my bespoke design work. If it’s mainly your website that feels off, have a look at the signs your business has outgrown its website.

Most small businesses need four or five: one main colour, a light neutral, a dark neutral for text and one or two accents. Any more than that and it gets hard to use them consistently. If your main colour is soft, a deeper shade of it for buttons and links is a sensible addition rather than an extra colour.

Start with three or four words for how you want clients to feel, then look at what local competitors use so you don’t blend in. Pick a main colour that fits those words, add neutrals and an accent, and test it on your phone, in print and next to photos of your space. Then run every text and button pairing through a contrast checker before you build anything with it.

A common, reliable pairing is an elegant serif for headings and a simple sans serif for body text. The heading font carries the personality and the body font keeps everything easy to read. Keep it to two fonts and use different weights if you want more variety.

No. Many fonts need a commercial or web licence, even if they were free to download. Check the licence covers web use before you use one, or choose from Google Fonts, which can be used commercially on business websites for free.

Not in the neat way it’s often presented. Reactions to colour vary by person, culture and context, so there’s no rule that a certain colour will make people book. Focus on whether your palette suits your feeling words, your clients and your photos.