McClatchy did not have a brand color palette, so I created one. Our team is frequently tasked with creating logos, identities and marketing campaigns, and we needed a way to streamline the color selection process.

While our core products (websites, apps) almost entirely use what we call Shasta Blue for color, and we intentionally limit the usage of color in order to keep the focus on our journalism, it is important to have options available for graphics, data visualization, marketing and other special use cases.

My goal for this project was to use design principles as well as accessibility standards to establish a universal color palette that could be used across our products.

I started with a complete audit of existing colors and palettes that were being used. The audit revealed how limited our currents options were for some colors and that we had too many options in some areas, such as the number of grays we used.

The new palette has a complete range of hues, with 6 shades/tints per hue, which were selected to have consistent values across the hues and to ensure AA accessibility standards are met. There are hierarchy and usage guidelines for each color and a semantic naming convention to ensure consistency and eliminate confusion and redundancy.