How to Create a Cohesive Brand Identity Through Workplace Color Schemes

Many companies invest months in perfecting their logo colors, typography, and digital identity, only to leave the office repaint in the hands of whoever’s available to do it for the lowest price. The end product is a workspace that doesn’t reflect the brand identity it’s intended to represent. The walls in your office say something to each and every employee, client, and candidate who walks through the door. The question is if you’re dictating that message or letting it be determined for you.

Plan the Execution to Protect Your Operations

Poorly planned commercial repaints are expensive in ways more important than dollars and cents. They cost productivity. They disrupt client-facing operations. And they don’t happen at the right time unless you plan them that way. However, make a repainting project like this a phase by phase project, and it’s not nearly as inconvenient or expensive as a lot of business owners think.

Get the right team in, repainting one section of a building at a time can give you the refresh you need to put your best face forward while work goes on as normal behind the screens. Businesses looking for that kind of specialist knowledge can work with Perth Professional Painters to plan a project that fits around their schedule. Spread the cost and disruption out that far, and it’s a pretty good deal all round.

Just make sure you’re dealing with a team that knows not just how to put a perfect finish on your wall but how to work evenings and weekends to get it done. You’ve got a business to run. Your painters shouldn’t be underfoot.

Translate Your Brand Palette, Don’t Transplant it

The most frequent error in commercial workplace design is simply lifting the precise hex codes from your brand style guide and applying them to an entire wall. What works on a website button or a business card simply doesn’t scale to a 40-square-metre conference room wall. High-saturation logo colors feel like lasers to your eyeballs within two hours, and that zingy pop of color you loved on screen can often feel like someone yelling at you when rendered at two meters high.

Use your brand color instead as an accent, not a field color. Stick to neutrals, warm whites, soft greys, muted greiges, for the majority of the wall space, and nominate a single accent wall, a reception feature, or a trim detail to use your primary brand color. This still creates unequivocal brand presence without giving your team a headache. Color can increase brand recognition by up to 80% (Loyola University Maryland), but you don’t need full saturation to achieve that uplift.

Strangely, smaller or secondary brand colors often translate better to larger fields than your primary color. Take your brand blue. Stretch it halfway toward grey, drop it two shades down the color swatch, and all of a sudden you can paint that color across an entire open-plan floor and no one will feel like they’re working inside a corporate brochure.

Design For How People Actually Use the Space

Various parts of an office play different roles in how our brains function, and the choice of color should reflect that. This is not an abstract concept but simply how real people engage with their surroundings.

Deep-focus areas and individual workstations demand cooler, lower-saturation color palettes. For example, soft blues and sage greens reduce cortical arousal, which is exactly what you need in spaces where you want people to knuckle down and concentrate for longer periods. The increased arousal and attention demanded by warmer, higher-saturation colors like amber, warm yellow, and terracotta make them perfect for collaborative zones and brainstorming spaces. These colors actively prompt conversation and lateral thinking.

Break rooms and informal meeting places are ideally suited to biophilic design. Earthy and plant tones, and natural textures let the brain know this environment is separate from the workspace. This psychological division is vital for true recovery between tasks.

Color also plays a part in wayfinding. When meeting rooms, quiet zones, and collaborative areas each come with their own color signature, users will intuitively understand where they are and where they need to go next.

Account For Light Before You Commit to a Color

Different types of lighting can alter the way you perceive colors on your walls. It is important to test the colors you’re considering in the actual space under the lighting conditions of the room at various times of the day. Painting a few larger swatches on different walls will allow you to see how the light interacts with the color throughout the day.

Specify the Right Products For a Commercial Environment

Regular paint isn’t suitable for use in an office environment, especially if you choose to use non-VOC paint. The formulations simply aren’t designed to withstand daily wear-and-tear and constant cleaning. Without specialty additives, standard paint is also at much higher risk of becoming dull and unattractive looking within the first year.