Color Theory in Brand Design — How Palash Sarkar Chooses Brand Colors

Palash Sarkar gets asked the same question on almost every branding project: "What color should our brand be?" It's usually asked like there's a single correct answer waiting to be discovered. There isn't — but there is a real process behind choosing brand colors well, and it has almost nothing to do with picking a favorite hex code.

Color Psychology Is a Starting Point, Not a Rulebook

Blue means trust, green means growth, red means urgency — these associations get repeated so often they start to sound like law. Palash Sarkar treats them as a starting point at best. Context matters more than the color wheel: blue is the default for fintech precisely because so many fintech brands have used it, which means a new blue fintech brand has to work harder to stand out, not less. On projects like Supercar Insurance, differentiation from an oversaturated category was a bigger factor than any textbook color association.

Contrast and Accessibility Come Before Aesthetics

A brand palette that looks beautiful in a mood board but fails contrast requirements in the actual product is a palette that needs to be reworked before launch, not after. Palash Sarkar checks every primary color pairing against WCAG contrast ratios early — not as a compliance afterthought, but because a palette that works for every user is genuinely a better palette, full stop. This matters even more in UI/UX work like the Swapster and XCore trading platforms, where color also carries functional meaning (gains, losses, alerts) on top of brand identity.

Building a Palette That Scales

A single hero color isn't a brand palette. Palash Sarkar builds every palette with a primary color, one or two secondary colors, and a full neutral range — because real products need far more shades of gray than anyone expects until they're deep into a UI build. A color system also needs to survive dark mode, print, and low-quality screen printing on merchandise, which is where a lot of trendy, oversaturated palettes quietly fail.

Key Takeaways

Choosing brand colors well is a research and systems problem disguised as an aesthetic one. Palash Sarkar's approach — psychology as a starting point, accessibility as a requirement, and a full scalable system instead of one hero color — is what separates a color choice that photographs well from one that actually holds up as a brand grows.