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Choosing a family color that best represents your dynasty, what you stand for and what you want to achieve is more important than it at first seems.
The short of it is that all great causes, big and small, well-intentioned or nefarious, have had symbols to rally behind. From Christianity to communism, from the Byzantines to the Visigoths, from food to founding fathers.
Symbolism plays a huge role in both our conscious and subconscious minds and color is a part of this symbolism.
Building a dynasty is one of the hardest things we can do as founding parents of a legacy family. It takes hard work, sacrifice and creating a culture that will outlive the individuals within it. It, of course, begins by building on the 4 types of capital, and educating yourself on what it actually is to build generational wealth(hint, it’s not about the money).
A family color is something that can be subtly woven throughout your family empire. Your family color is something you will integrate into your family emblem. You can add it to or use it for the colors of the logos of your family operating businesses, your attire, to interior feature walls in your house.
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What A Color is to a Family
A family color is an element that will create nostalgia for the family in each of its members. It promotes unity and creates something, though simple, to rally around and be proud of.
And before you write it off, it pays to take a look through the world. Every country has strong color representation in their flag. The USA has “Red, White and Blue”, China has “Red and Gold” and so on.
The Flag of the USA, inspiring patriotism for generations
Historically causes, great and nefarious in nature, have had a color represent them as well. The USSR had Red and Gold (and communist China) And the Byzantine Empire had yellow and Red…Yes, I am hinting at something here.
Intent and personal political rhetoric aside, there’s a reason color combinations have a certain tethering to a particular movement, and that there are color similarities in ideologies as well. That’s because colors have a certain meaning, both in a socially constructed sense and to our inner monkey brains. I mean, there’s a reason food packaging has rather similar colors – to drive buyer decisions and appetite with proven color triggers.
Choosing a Family Color
Choosing the colors for your family is a rather critical decision, and once made, can not be undone. For this reason, it pays to be as informed as possible and use the numerous free resources available to you thanks to the advent of the internet.
Your colors need to have a few characteristics, but first, you need to decide on the number of colors you want to implement.
Quantity
You don’t have to be restricted to just one color. Multiple colors that gel well together can be very well suited to represent your family. But be forewarned, the more colors you have, the less well they function in tandem with one another and the more sacrifices you make to memorability. Imagine if you had every color representing your family, it would be equivocal to having no color representing your family (not to mention the connotations that come with rainbows in the modern day). Therefore, by having more colors, you have less solidarity.
Personally, I believe that 3 is the most any family should have, ideally one or 2 synergistic colors.
Characteristics of your Family Color
Your family colors should be representative of your family ideals. Beyond quantity, there are 3 core areas to focus on when selecting a family color.
Culturally Appropriate
Different colors mean different things across the world. Red and Gold, while aesthetically pleasing, carries the nasty undertone of communism/socialism. Unless you idealize these things these may not be the best color choices. On a side note, if you want generational wealth and a dynasty, you really don’t want forced socialism or communism. Both of these are designed to strip families of solidarity/cohesion and remove their their wealth.
Instead, you want to choose colors that are appropriate for your local culture and that won’t offend. If you were a Jewish family, red, white and black may not be the best color combo, if you know what I mean.
Likewise, if you were American and particularly patriotic, you may adopt the red white and blue as a means of showing the world of your origins and solidarity to your country.
Aesthetics
Like anything visual, aesthetics are important when it comes to choosing a family color. You (probably) aren’t going to want to have hot pink and coffee as color choices to represent your family. Instead, you want to choose a color that isn’t going to repulse people, and if you have multiple colors, they should blend well together.
There are plenty of books on color theory, but the easiest thing to do is to jump on a color wheel and start comparing. You’ll quickly get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. My favorite color wheel can be found here.
Connotations
The connotations your colors implicate are the most important things in family color selection. Like I keep pointing out, the implications of inappropriate cultural color selection can lead to a misrepresentation of ideals. Such as with with Communism or even Nazism (let’s not forget Nazis were socialists!) ideals.
You really want to pick family colors that not only inspire your family members but invigorate others who see them. The colors you choose should be integral to your values, morals and intentions and present them to the world.
These, of course, are difficult to show through color alone, but alongside your reputation, your family emblem and with the participation in your community, you family color will serve your family well in representation of there are connotations.
Meanings of Colors
Color is a funny thing. You can look at it from many different angles. Our subconscious mind is drawn towards bright-colored fruits as a means of finding crucial vitamins(that’s also why we like sugar, interestingly – it wasn’t always so easy to get a hold of). We are drawn to red for meat and injury, and for berries, while grey and blue foods are less appetizing as they are colors of rot.
It’s fascinating that people eat less food when it’s colored blue, even eating off of a blue plate has been shown to reduce the amount of food eaten.
Take this as evidence that the colors you choose, on a primal level, matter. And from these primal meanings, you can deduce a good starting point for choosing your family color. Not only this, but as mentioned, there are cultural connotations as well. I can’t obviously cover every meaning for every color across all cultures…but I intend to give you a place to start from.
Blue
Positives: Trust, loyalty, love, solidarity, intellect, masculinity
Negatives: Cold, fear, damp
Red
Positives: Love, energy, warmth, power, passion
Negatives: Anger, warning, danger, stop
Green
Positives: Growth, fertility, healing, fresh, money
Negatives: Envy, jealousy, guilt
Purple
Positives: Royalty, nobility, spirituality, luxury, ambition
Negatives: Mystery, moodiness
Black
Positives: Protection, class, formality, drama, professionalism
Negatives: Death(in some Cultures) evil, concealment
White
Positives: Goodness, purity, fresh, clean innocence
Negatives: Doesn’t show up on paper,
Grey
Positives: Security, reliability, intelligence, solidity, conservatism
Negatives: Ambiguity, gloomy, sad, indecision
Brown
Positives: Stability, earthly, honesty, productivity, conservatism, longevity, appetite
Negatives: Cheapness, death, decay
Pink
Positives: Healthy, happy, femininity, playful, compassion, tenderness
Negatives: Femininity, dependency, cautious nature, weakness, immaturity
Beige
Positives: Dependable, conservative, flexible, calm, flexible
Negatives: Dull, boring, dry
Yellow
Positives: Hope, happiness, warmth, energy, optimism, intelligence
Negatives: Anxiety, deception, cowardice, caution, irrationality
Orange
Positives: Courage, confidence, friendliness, success, extroversion, risk-taker
Negatives: Insincerity, dependency, indulgent,
Silver
Positives: Organized, graceful, calming, dignified, wise
Negatives: Cold, unemotional, indecision, boredom
Gold
Positives: Prestige, wisdom, wealth, prosperity, traditional
Negatives: Controlling, overbearing, materialistic
The Next Step After Your Family Color
So with that, you now have a starting place to decide on a color or set of colors to represent your family. Be sure to gain an understanding of the local cultural representations of each of the colors you choose as well. You should focus on the culture you’ll primarily be interacting with, or with the colors of the heritage you wish to pay homage to.
If you’re in the process of creating a family emblem, the things that go along with this are choosing and creating family symbol and creating a family motto.
Choosing a family color is an incredibly important step in building a dynasty form multiple reasons. While it’s not necessarily the first step you should take in building generational wealth it does give solidarity and guidance in emblem creation, which is important in creating a multi generational culture.
For more on generational wealth creation, you can check out my other content. Alternatively, you can read the mega-post on generational wealth creation, which is a veritable mini-book.
To have your Emblem, Color and Motto professionally designed, you can reach out to me here.
Thanks for reading. Yours,