Brand colours in video: from your logo to a readable palette
MaestroCut Editorial Team 3 min readPublished:
When you use brand colours in a video, assign them to roles rather than straight to text: background, surface, text, muted text, accent, second accent and text-on-accent. Body text needs at least 4.5:1 contrast against the background; large headlines and the accent colour need at least 3:1. If your logo colours miss those ratios, keep the hue and adjust only the lightness.
Splitting colours into roles
| Role | Where it's used |
|---|---|
| Background (bg) | The ground of the scene |
| Surface | Cards and boxes |
| Inverse surface (surfaceAlt) | Inverse pages, contrast blocks |
| Text | Headlines and body text |
| Muted text | Sub-lines and labels |
| Accent | Emphasised words, buttons, lines |
| Second accent (accent2) | Secondary decoration, charts |
| On-accent (onAccent) | Text placed on the accent colour |
| Line | Thin dividers and grids |
Choosing a colour by its role lets the same video be re-skinned in different styles (Kinetic, Luxe, Interface…): the style changes, the colour roles stay.
Contrast: the numeric rule of readability
- Body text / background: at least 4.5:1 (WCAG AA).
- Large headline and accent colour / background: at least 3:1.
- Muted text / surface: at least 4.5:1 (sub-lines are small).
- Text on accent: at least 4.5:1 against the accent colour.
Extracting a palette from a logo
- 1
Drop the background
Transparent pixels in a transparent logo — or the dominant edge colour in a logo on a flat background — count as background and are left out.
- 2
Cluster the colours
Pixels are clustered in a perceptual colour space (OKLab); anti-aliasing in-betweens and tiny clusters are dropped.
- 3
Assign roles
The most vivid cluster becomes the accent, a clearly different hue the second accent; background and text are derived from the darkest and lightest tones.
- 4
Repair the contrast
Only lightness is adjusted until every role pair meets its threshold.
Dark or light?
48% of the 93 palettes in the MaestroCut industry playbooks are dark; the rest are light. Dark themes stand out in tech, gaming and nightlife; light themes in healthcare, education, cafés and retail. Glowing colours look more vivid on a dark ground; longer text reads more comfortably on a light one.
Fonts and extended Latin characters
For languages like Turkish, Polish or Czech, a font must support the latin-ext subset (ğ, ş, ı, ł, č…). 74 of the 74 font families in the MaestroCut theme set support it. A characterful display font for headlines and a plain text font for body copy is the safest pairing.
Font pairings for every sector are in the industry guides; the most recommended headline fonts are in the video report.
Frequently asked questions
What contrast should text in a video have?
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At least 4.5:1 for body text and at least 3:1 for large headlines and the accent colour (WCAG AA).
What if my logo colour is too light for text?
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Keep its hue and lower its lightness (or raise it on a dark ground). The brand colour stays recognisable and meets the contrast threshold.
How do I pick a font that supports accented characters?
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Check on Google Fonts that the font supports the "Latin Extended" subset, and try the special letters of your language in the preview text.
Sources and notes
- W3C WCAG 2.2, Success Criterion 1.4.3 (Contrast, minimum)
- MaestroCut theme set and font data (2026-10)
This page was last reviewed on . Numbers come from the MaestroCut platform and industry data set and are updated as platforms change their limits.
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