Colour is the part of a logo owners argue about most and think about least. It is also the part that fails quietly, long after the design is signed off.

Colour sets the expectation before the words do

People read colour faster than text. Deep blues and greys read as established and careful, which is why banks, security companies and consultancies lean on them. Greens suggest health, growth and cleaning. Reds and oranges push urgency and appetite. Black with a single bright accent reads as modern and confident.

None of these are rules, but they are expectations. If your funeral services logo is bright yellow, you are working against what people already assume.

The three places colour usually fails

• On a vehicle. A pale logo on a white bakkie disappears at a traffic light. Your vehicle is a moving advert and it should be legible from two lanes away.
• On a phone screen in sunlight. Low-contrast colours vanish outdoors, which is where half your customers will look at your site.
• In one colour. Embroidery, stamps, invoices and signage often need a single-colour version. If your logo only works in full colour with a gradient, you will be redrawing it under pressure.

How to test yours in five minutes

Print your logo in black and white. Shrink it to the size of a thumbnail. Put it on a white background, then a black one. Take a photo of your screen outdoors. If it survives all four, the colours are doing their job.

Too many colours is the other trap

A logo with five colours costs more to print, fails in embroidery, and gives you nothing consistent to build a website or a flyer around. Two is usually enough: one that carries the brand, one that draws the eye to the thing you want clicked or called.

That is also how a website stays coherent. When I design a logo, the file pack includes the exact colour codes, so your printer, your signwriter and your website all use the same values instead of three near-enough guesses.

When to change your colours, and when to leave them

If customers recognise your vehicle or your shopfront, be careful. Recognition is worth more than fashion, and a colour change resets it. The safer move is usually to keep the core colour and fix the problems around it: better contrast, a proper single-colour version, a defined accent.

Change properly when the colours actively work against you, when they clash with the market you are moving into, or when nobody can reproduce them consistently because they were never written down.