Colour per brand: red, yellow, orange and ink

The four brands of Color of Vietnam share one small palette: a paper ground, ink, flag red, star yellow and a warm orange. Each brand takes one colour as its lead: Let's PLAY is red, PLAY Nutrition is yellow, Natural & Healthy is orange, PLAY Protein Bar is ink. That gives four faces on the shelf which still read as one family when they stand side by side. This piece explains why we chose one shared palette instead of four, and describes one wrong choice we made and corrected.

Why one palette

A house of brands, a company where each product carries its own name with the parent standing behind it, usually lets each brand pick its colours freely. With a large team that works. With a small team, four palettes mean four sets of files, four printing profiles and four arguments every time a new pack is designed.

We went the other way: one palette, very few colours, and clear rules about which brand may use which colour as its lead. What it gives us:

• Printers work with one set of colours, so there is less drift between print runs.
• Everything the company produces, from the website to a shipping carton, looks like it came from one place.
• A new colleague learns one palette and four rules, not four systems.
• Buyers see four distinct brands on the shelf, and the small stamp A brand of Color of Vietnam in the corner tells them who is responsible.

Paper and ink: the shared ground

Two colours are used identically by all four brands. The paper ground is a warm cream, like a sheet of paper rather than cold white. The ink is a warm black used for text and borders. These two cover most of the surface of everything we make. The brand colour takes only a small share: one panel, one heading, one mark.

That small share rule is why four brands can differ without shouting at each other. Red beside yellow beside orange on white is noise. Red, yellow and orange each in a small panel on paper with an ink border is calm.

Four colours, four voices

• Let's PLAY takes red. It is the brand for sharing, for children and for the Ô ăn quan game on the jar. Red is the liveliest colour in the palette, and it is the colour of the flag.
• PLAY Nutrition takes yellow. It is the brand for active days, and it has to be found fast in a backpack or at a checkout. Yellow stands out most on paper.
• Natural & Healthy takes orange. It is the brand of the ingredient, above all roasted cashew. Orange is the closest thing in the palette to a roasted nut, warm without being sweet.
• PLAY Protein Bar takes ink. It is the brand for people who train, more serious and less decorated. Ink as the lead colour sets the bar apart and makes the protein figure easy to read.

Each brand may borrow another brand's colour as a small accent, never as its main panel. A Let's PLAY jar may carry a yellow star. It may not be half yellow.

A wrong choice, corrected

At first PLAY Protein Bar was given a dark red, a wine red, to sit apart from the flag red of Let's PLAY while staying in the red family. On screen the two reds were clearly different. On printed proofs placed side by side on a mock shelf, they looked like one brand printed slightly off. A shopper glancing past would have read them as two flavours of the same product.

We removed the dark red from the palette, kept a single red, and moved PLAY Protein Bar to ink. The result was better than we expected: the protein bar looks as serious as its eaters want it to, and the palette has one colour fewer. The lesson went into the notes: approve colours on printed proofs next to the other brands, never on a screen.

Keeping the palette from drifting

The palette lives in the company's design system, the document that records colours, type and the rules for using them, with exact values for print and for screens. Every file sent to a printer, every social post, every article cover on this site takes its colours from there. Anyone who wants to add a colour has to answer two questions: which colour does it replace, and which brand gets it as a lead. Usually those two questions are enough to keep the palette as it is.

If you are a marketer who likes working inside a clear system with few colours, the Marketing Leader role in Hanoi may suit you. If you are a printer or packaging supplier, get in touch and we will send the colour values before the first proof.