The case for a single colour

Ask people to describe a brand they like and they usually start with a colour. Ask them about a brand with a palette of six, and they start with the logo, then give up halfway.

One colour is a memory shortcut

When Orto Coffee opened its second shop, we kept the walls, the floor and the furniture neutral and put all the orange in one place: a counter that runs the length of the room. People who had never heard of Orto started calling it the orange bar. That is free advertising, and it only works if the colour belongs to one brand on the street.

It costs less to run

Every extra colour means another printer profile, another paint code and another chance to get it slightly wrong. Arca Wines prints its labels in three countries. With one orange and black text, the labels match on every press, and proofing takes a day where it used to take a week.

A single colour also makes a small budget look bigger. A tote bag, a sticker on a laptop and a sign above a door all read as the same brand when they share one colour, even if they were printed by three different suppliers in three different years.

• Pick the colour your competitors avoid, then test it in print, on screens and on fabric.
• Keep a neutral for text and backgrounds, and never set long text in the brand colour.
• Write down the exact codes for paint, print and screen, and send them to every supplier.

When one is not enough

Groups with many product lines sometimes need a second colour to tell them apart. Fable Books uses grey for essays next to orange for fiction. Even there, the second colour plays a supporting part, and the first one still does the remembering. Most clients find that one colour is plenty once they stop adding more.