Developing a colour palette is key for any brand, a recognisable colour set can really enhance the brand and make it memorable. There is also the factor of colour psychology ensuring that the colours used represent the values and ethics of the brand. On a more practical note having a set colour palette helps to keep a brand consistent and will help me to tie the brand to my UI.
Through my research into what logos were used to represent autism, autism charities and support organisations, two colours had came to the fore:
Blue as a colour has been used by many autism brands as well as an awareness campaign "Light it up blue" for autism awareness month. However its use by Autism Speaks and so issues surrounding Autism Awareness Month from some parts of the autistic community need to be considered.
Gold has become a colour associated with autism (the chemical symbol for Gold is AU the same as the first two letters of the word Autism). Gold has less problematic connotations than blue but as a primary colour may prove challenging to use in a UI accessibly.
For these reasons I decided to look at a colour palette based around blue and gold. These were my first few attempts:
While I liked these options as colours, once I applied them to UI and brand elements, they gave a the feel of a luxury brand or product. As my product is designed to be free to use, this is in many ways the opposite of the values of my brand. The more I looked into other brands that do use blue and in particular navy with gold, I found many luxury brands, this means this is already the expectation for brands using this colour palette and this expectation would be applied to my brand, which I don’t want.
I now needed to explore other potential colour palette options, I decided to start with colours I personally liked and had experience of using.
Here are some of the options:
While in isolation these were nice colours I needed to look at them in use to get a clearer picture of how they would work moving forward as I create more assets and my final product, to achieve this I created some basic test pages to try out each palette.
