Pulp & Co. is a juice brand we made up. It lives in Brandbook’s demo workspace next to Late Club, to show how an agency runs several brands at once. But we built its palette carefully, because it’s a good example of a small set of colours doing a lot of work. So let’s pull it apart.
Pulp & Co. has three colours. That’s it.
- Pulp Orange #FF6A13, the primary, at about 30% of a layout.
- Rind #FFF3DE, the ground, at about 55%.
- Seed #2B1B12, the text colour, at about 15%.
1. Fewer colours, more recognition
Most brands I’ve worked with had eight to twelve colours in the guidelines and used four. The rest existed because someone once needed a chart. Every extra colour is a decision people get wrong, and models will cheerfully use all of them in one ad.
With three, there’s nowhere to hide. Every layout is orange, cream and dark brown, and you recognise it from a distance. If Pulp needs another colour one day, adding it will be a real decision.
2. The ground isn’t white
Rind is a warm cream, and it covers more than half of everything. This is the quiet trick. White makes every brand look like a website. A tinted ground makes even a plain text post look like Pulp, and it makes the orange feel warmer next to it.
Writing the share down matters. “Rind at about 55%” stops the most common drift, which is a designer or a model reaching for white because it’s the default.
3. The text isn’t black
Seed is a very dark brown. On Rind it reads at about 15:1, comfortably past any accessibility standard. But it’s softer than black, and it belongs to the same warm family as the other two. Pure black text on cream would look like a photocopy.
4. The orange knows its limits
Here’s where Pulp gets it right and most bright brands get it wrong. Pulp Orange on Rind is only about 2.6:1. White on Pulp Orange is about 2.9:1. Neither is enough for body text. Lots of brands with a loud primary set their copy in it anyway and wonder why it feels hard to read.
Pulp uses orange for shapes, backgrounds and very large display type, and keeps reading text in Seed. Seed on orange works, at about 5.8:1. That one pairing rule does more for the brand than any amount of orange.
Brandbook’s checker flags exactly this. If a design puts text on a background with less than 3:1 contrast, it warns you and tells you to use dark text on light colours and light text on dark ones.
5. One orange, not five
Bright oranges drift more than any other colour I know. Print shifts them, screens shift them, and every eyedropper picks a slightly different one from a compressed photo. #FF7A1A and #F26B1D both look like “the orange” on their own. Next to the real one, they look tired.
Brandbook measures how far apart two colours look, not just whether the hex values match. Those two near misses are each about 7 to 8 units away from Pulp Orange: close enough to be a mistake, far enough to see. The checker calls them off-palette and offers to swap them to #FF6A13 in one click. That’s how you keep one orange.
What to take for your own brand
- Count the colours you actually use. Cut the rest from the guidelines.
- Give every colour a role and a rough share of the layout.
- Consider a tinted ground. It does more for recognition than another accent.
- Write down which text colour goes on which background, with the contrast.
- Treat your loudest colour as a shape colour first and a text colour almost never.
Pulp & Co. isn’t a real juice brand, but every one of these choices came from real ones that worked. Steal them. Then write them down where your tools can read them, so the orange stays the orange.
