By What colors come to mind when you envision things or events such as Easter eggs, a birthday card, and/or a gender reveal party? More importantly, how do those colors make you feel? The most common adjectives to describe the feeling pastel colors give off include: dreamy, playful, cute, soft, and everything soothing.
Additionally, if you’re known for your Instagram themes, or maybe you’re in the events planning industry, pastel colors show up literally everywhere! Photographers, designers, painters, and even bakers are no strangers to the innocent energy that they bring.
But the question remains: what exactly are pastel colors?
In this blog, we’ll take you through the world of pastels with a Simplified definition, give you ideas about pastel color palettes, and show how you can use them in your own designs. So let’s go!
What is a Pastel Color?
The easiest way to see pastels is through the sky, right before sunrise and sunset. Like the picture above!
Pastel colors are typically light or muted versions of the color wheel’s primary and secondary color hues. They’re named as such because they have a “pastel” quality to them, which makes them seem soft, delicate, and even dreamy.
Basically, making a pastel color happen is by giving any color a high hue point (lightness) and some desaturation. Having a pastel color in your color palette is ideal if you want to give off a soft vibe.
Simply put, they’re the paler version of any color by replacing the dense concentration with white. The result? A softer and more toned-down color without losing its colorful personality for the design!
Popular examples of pastel colors include mint, baby pink or blue, peach, and mauve.
Making a color scheme using pastel colors
Stick to pastel color palettes (like the photos above) and build consistent themes with your brand. With Simplified’s Brand Kit, you can create your brand’s theme and consistently use them on your content. You can even upload custom fonts, logos, and images too!
Owing to the serene emotional response these tones evoke, pastel colors are most often related to themes of springtime and newness. Moreover, these “washed-out” colors are actually quite sophisticated and friendly when in action!
For instance, designers can add an emotional quotient to their work just by including appropriate color schemes and pastel color palettes.
Want to know how to make pastel colors? Here are some examples of palettes you can try in your designs:
Bonus: New Color Pallete Combos to Make Your Designs Standout
1. Baby’s colors
More commonly used for baby showers, gender reveals, and baby birthdays, these pastel colors scream ‘soft baby’.
2. Sunset colors
These colors are both yellow and a bit of peach, just like what a sunset looks like.
3. Sunrise colors
Since there’s a palette for the sunset, we also looked for colors that match the sunrise.
4. Ice Cream Soda
Pink can be included in many color palettes and this is just one of them. It’s a mix of light pink and tangerine, similar to sunset colors but with a dash of pink.
5. Green and Pink
A green and pink pastel color palette looks just like the typical tulip.
6. Purple
These pastel colors are an assortment of muted shades of purple with a bit of brown.
7. Peaches
This color palette is similar to a peach and it has both shades of yellow and pink.
8. Zombie-like pastel colors
From its name, the color palette is the pastel version of a zombie (think Plants vs. Zombies!).
9. Mint Green
Some say that lighter shades of green represent tranquility, health, and good luck. You can use this color palette with that in mind to motivate your business even more!
10. Brown
Also known as neutral colors, this shade of brown perfectly complements primary and secondary colors.
Using pastels in your business branding
Use pastel color palettes to add softness to your brand image through packaging design, like how these hair products were made. Apart from the fields of interior design, clothing, and photography, pastels are widely popular in packaging design as well. Be it a line of baby products, or a premium quality skincare brand, they’re everywhere! You know what’s even better? Pastel colors can help in expressing a kind and loving brand identity. (like cruelty or preservative-free).
Pastel Color Tips To Ace Your Social Media Aesthetics
- Create a mood board to visualize better.
- Pick your brand colors and find their pastel alternatives.
- Balance your brand message using appropriate typography.
By following these tips, you can easily create and pull off an aesthetic brand image on social media. And to successfully do that, you’d need an all-around tool… like Simplified!
With Simplified, you can create, design, edit, write, plan, schedule, collaborate, and basically manage all your social media accounts in just one workspace. But most importantly, create unlimited color combinations using the Simplified Color Palette Generator.
Simply upload a photo of your choice and the tool will give a series of colors from the image that makes a color palette. You can download it as an image or PDF too!
Once you have your content ready to go, schedule a post using the Social Media Scheduler, and you’re done! What makes Simplified the best is you don’t need to switch from multiple tabs to get tasks done. Simplified works with only one dynamic workspace making social media management way easier.
With your custom color palette, use Simplified’s one-click graphic design tool to design your brand’s visual content. Look through thousands of ready-made templates for any kind of marketing copy, edit photos, resize images, and more. It’s also easy to collaborate with teams and streamline your workflow with Simplified’s collaboration features.
Easily have your own color combinations using Simplified’s color palette generator. From visually appealing images to catchy and concise captions, it’s possible to do all that in Simplified.
