Easiest way to create your Instagram colour palette.
In my opinion, the first 5 seconds spent on viewing an Instagram page is critical — You need to be heavily indulged. Hence, having high-quality content with a splash of colour consistency will put you right on top of the food chain. It will take a while for you to find your style or colours but at the end of the day, it is definitely achievable. Let’s dive into it.
Having a consistent colour theme.
Here are some of my favourite Instagram accounts with consistent colours.
The Cinematic Tones.
If you are an avid movie goer, the first thing you will notice is that most of the films uses a certain colour template and combination to enhance and engage the audiences.
Some movie examples:
These colour palettes are carefully selected or used to enhance the mood and story behind each film. Most of the general colours in them are either removed or desaturated which allows the audiences to focus on what is important — mainly on the psychological effect they bring to viewers.
Now, we understand why certain brands or users utilises certain colours to express their mood. Next, we will look at combining these colours. Having only 1 or 2 colour combination is a disadvantage if your feed is about selling brightly coloured health care products or food. It solely depends on what your goals are — are you selling a service/product/lifestyle or are you setting up a gallery page for your audiences.
The Complimentary Colour Scheme (The Opposite):
“Two colors on opposite sides of the color wheel make a complimentary pair. This is by far the most commonly used pairing. A common example is orange and blue, or teal. This pairs a warm color with a cool color and produces a high contrast and vibrant result. Saturation must be managed but a complimentary pair are often quite naturally pleasing to the eye.”
Teal and orange is a widely used colour combination in most movies, videos and photographs in today’s world. It is also one of the easiest method to make your visual look attractive and uniformed. However, the downside of this 2 tone combination is the inability to express certain colours in your pictures. For example, the teal and orange will look good with pictures taken at the beach but not over a bowl of fruit salad. This is when you can experiment with adding more colours into the teal and orange combination. I will use a stock photo to show you what I mean.
I have turned the stock photo into something teal and orange. It looks really appealing at first glance. Imagine having this colour tone splashed all over your Instagram feed. Tasty! However, depending on different situations, you might have to improvise a little. The teal and orange look will take away most of the greens in the picture. Seeing that this picture falls more into the ‘travel blog’ genre, you might want to add some greens in it and keep your teal and orange colour template.
I have added greens on top of my previous teal and orange look. With this in play, not only do you maintain the teal and orange look, you have a touch of “nature” in your picture. However, if you are tasked to produce something for a travel magazine and they require something natural looking, you can change the colours too.
Summary:
Use the complimentary tone technique and pair your favourite colours first. Then, add in certain colours to create your signature template. I have put together a small Instagram feed for your reference. In this picture, you can see the overall teal and orange look with an addition of external colours.
You can start to see some consistency in colours on the feed to the right with the teal and orange look. Here are some of the work that I’ve done for my clients using the colour consistency technique.
Apart from the colour consistency technique, you have to understand the fundamentals behind your subjects — framing, positioning and placements.
Once these are all in place, you will begin to see your work of art coming together.
Have fun experimenting with colours on your Instagram feed. Remember, less is more! If you have any questions, you can email me at helloalfredtwj@gmail.com
Thanks for reading!
