You’ve got to be pretty tough to get through Winter in the natural world, and these extremes are reflected in the Winter personality. The temperature drops, colours intensify and the light clears. Winter is all about extremes – ice blues, polar whites, rich blacks, neons and metallics.
Winter is all about the drama. The extreme colours, the decisiveness and the focus. Winter businesses are realistic, centred, self assured, practical, reliable and intelligent. They are detatched, objective, ambitious, controlled and disciplined. They tend to do everything to excess – either enormously hedonistic or very grounded. They can see the bigger picture and also work right down at the detail level.
Typical winter businesses include technology companies, top end white goods and car manufacturers, logistics firms and financial services. Winter is all about the precision. Winter is glamorous, opulent, luxurious, rich, even. Shapes tend to be very defined – diamonds, straight lines, geometric patterns and angular shapes.
This website we designed for estate agents Keeler and Co is typically winter. Bright pink, black, charcoal grey and the geometric background patterns take this website upmarket and luxurious.
Negatively Winter businesses can be perceived as being cold, uncaring and insensitive. They don’t tend to suffer fools gladly and tell it like it is, which often means that what they say can hurt peoples feelings. Like all the seasons, if you mix together the right palette it’s not an issue, you won’t communicate these negative connotations.
It’s interesting to note that the Winter palette is the only one that contains black. Black is widely used by many businesses but that doesn’t mean it’s right for everybody. Unless you’re a winter business steer clear – charcoal grey works, black is hard to carry off and can ‘throw’ your palette if you’re not careful.
If this has whetted your appetite then join me at the Horsley Network on Monday evening when I’ll be talking about Colour Psychology in more detail. Full details on their website. And of course if you’d like a colour psychology analysis for your own business then do get in touch and book yourself in for a complimentary branding consultation and we’ll take things from there. Enjoy!
So now that we’re at the end of the seasons, which one resonated with you the most? I’d love to know…
Credits: Dining room Interi0r; Flowers: My Wedding Dream; Malabar Wallpaper: Cole and Son; Laser Cut Invitations: Cutture; Sandals: Jimmy Choo; Ring: Tiffany; Carafe: John Lewis
I’m so pleased you’ve put these posts out there Fi. It really enhanced a particular conversation I had with a client yesterday when working on customer archetypes for her financial services business. I was able to point her at your blog knowing that the winter personality today would hit the perfect mark for her. Thank you!
Keep ‘em coming
Great mood boards too, I love the Eat Me! of autumn…as an autumn personality with an autumn business it made me smile
Interesting… Colour psychology can be applied in so many different ways to enhance your understanding of people and businesses – that’s why I love it! I’ll be blogging next week on the individual colours so keep your eyes peeled…
Interesting idea about the difference between your personal colour profile and the colour personality of your business. Because your business is about your clients as well as about you. I always assumed that because I was an autumn type as an individual, I would choose autumn for my business, but now I feel that maybe more Spring is required….
Interesting… yes, it’s never as clear cut as you think. It’s about balancing off the needs of you as an individual, you as a business and what your clients want to see. It’s not an easy balancing act, but one that’s a lot of fun to do!
Oooh! I love this post. And I absolutely adore all the images – I guess it just shows what a Winter I am! Not to keen on the negative connections, but I will just have to watch those.
I love your blogs about purple and black – two of my absolute favourite colours and certainly part of my business and personal colour schemes.
Great content as always, Fiona.
Thank you Nicky. No one is ever too keen on the negative connotations of anything are they? I thought you’d like the bling of the Winter palette, I’ve surprised myself by quite liking it too…
[...] Flourish’s point is that the colours you choose for your business should match up with your brand and also (if you’re a small business like a photographer) your personality. I created my brand colours before looking into colour psychology but I’m pretty sure my colours match a Summer personality with just a touch of Spring. Luckily this matches what I am trying to get across with my brand and style of photography (Summer’s aspirational elegance and Spring’s fun and playfulness) so subconsciously my colour choices have fallen into place. What colour personality are you? Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter? [...]
[...] created Rachel’s brand identity from scratch. It’s very Winter in style and Chloe has created a very strong, fun, poppy look which fits with Rachel’s brief [...]