Berlin didn’t get like this by accident. The wall that split the city became the canvas, and the paint on it wasn’t decoration, it was people on the free side saying something to the ones who couldn’t reach it: about freedom, about the ones the wall kept apart, about not staying quiet just because staying quiet was safer. When the wall came down, that instinct didn’t disappear. Artists moved into the empty buildings left behind and kept using colour as a way of reclaiming public space and making a claim on it. The city could have painted over all of it. Instead it built legal walls for artists to keep working on, and colour that started as protest became something Berlin is now known for.
Standing in the middle of it, I started thinking about how much of what happens with colour back home is inherited rather than chosen. Most brand palettes get built because that’s what a brand palette is supposed to look like, not because anyone actually decided that’s what the business needed to say. Berlin doesn’t work that way. Nobody there is asking permission to be loud.
That’s what got me thinking about your brand colours. Not whether they’re pretty. Whether you actually chose them, or whether they chose themselves.
Maybe you’ve never explicitly thought about what your colours are doing. Maybe they got picked because they appealed to someone in the room, or a palette on Canva caught your eye and felt like a reasonable place to start. There’s nothing wrong with either of those as a starting point. But the colours representing your business have a bigger job than looking good together. They’re very likely the thing deciding what a stranger expects from you before they’ve read a word of your copy.
Berlin taught me something else too. Walk down a street covered wall to wall in it and everyone is trying to be noticed at once. It’s bold everywhere, all at the same time, and after a while that boldness starts to blur together. You actually have to stop and look close to catch any one piece, because there’s so much competing for your eye that most of it gets missed.
That’s the part I didn’t want to repeat in my own palette. Being loud only works if there’s room for it to land. My pink and my green get to be bold precisely because they’re not fighting a wall full of other bold things for your attention. Berlin is worth walking through slowly and taking in piece by piece. A brand isn’t. It has one shot to be seen, so the restraint around the colour is what lets the colour actually do its job.
That’s the real question underneath all of this. What matters is that the palette you’ve got actually matches what you need it to say, not the one that happened to be sitting there.
Before the colour gets chosen, the foundational work is getting clear on what makes the business distinct and who it’s actually for. Once that’s settled, colour becomes one piece of the Design Guidelines that everything else gets built on: the online experience, the templates, the AI workflows a team plugs in alongside the work later. Chosen once, chosen properly, it carries forward instead of getting redone every time something changes.
That’s the process I walk clients through, one step at a time, so the thinking is settled before a single colour gets picked.
If you’d like to talk about whether your brand colours are doing the job they should be, book a discovery call.
