The Color Palette Mistake Every New Designer Makes

A new designer once presented a brand palette with six colors, each used roughly the same amount across the materials. It looked lively in the presentation deck and fell apart the moment it hit a real application — a website, a business card, a social template — because nothing in the system signaled which color was actually in charge.

Strong palettes almost always have a clear hierarchy: one dominant color doing most of the work, one supporting color used deliberately for contrast or accents, and a neutral doing the heavy lifting in text and backgrounds. Everything else is a variation derived from those three, not a separate, equally-weighted choice.

A useful exercise: try describing the palette’s hierarchy out loud in one sentence — “mostly navy, with warm orange for calls to action, on a cream background.” If that sentence doesn’t come easily, the palette probably doesn’t have a hierarchy yet, no matter how nice the individual swatches look.