A color palette is simply a range of colors. In graphic design, a color palette helps to define a brand look, or the look of a particular project or campaign. A color palette may strive to elicit a mood, a feeling, or a design direction such as bold, authoritative, cheeky, modern, or romantic. “Color meanings” are culturally specific associations that underlie many of these choices.

First set down some ideas about the emotions and qualities you would like your colors to elicit. You can then choose your colors by tonal range (mid-tones, pastels, etc.) or by using the color wheel to select colors according to analogous, complementary, and triadic color schemes. Depending on how extensive your brand work is, you may want to create a palette that includes primary colors and secondary colors too. You can also start with a photograph, and upload it to a color palette generator, to extract color codes for the predominant colors in it. Finally, you can use a color palette template to keep and share your chosen colors.

The beauty of choosing your color palette in a purposeful way is that it’s very easy to replicate those exact colors when you are creating design assets later. A good color palette specifies color codes for each color—there are a few standard systems for color identification (RGB, HSV, and CMYK, HEX), but for digital media, HEX is the most common. Load the HEX color codes in the color picker tool in Shutterstock Create any time you’re editing a graphic, background, or text on an image, and you’ll be implementing your color palette perfectly.