The company I'm designing a site for has an logo that I must work with. All of my ideas for standard color palettes and layouts are challenged by this logo.. Most [good looking] logos I've worked with and seen have one, two, maybe three colors. This one has six. They look okay within the context of the logo, but I'm having a difficult time translating any of them into the rest of the design. The only thing that's been promising is use of mostly neutral colors, but this leaves the site looking a tad bit boring, in my opinion.

Does anyone have any tips for this sort of situation?

Edit: Thanks for the answers, guys. I'm not comfortable posting the actual logo, but I threw this together to give a better idea of what I'm working with as far as colors and their corresponding dominance-


I probably made the color combination sound worse than it actually is because I've been over-thinking this. My most recent design iteration came out pretty well, but it does incorporate DA01's one-color suggestion which I'll have to run by the client. That opens up a lot of options.


A bad/obnoxious logo is like a bad/obnoxious person. You have to segregate them from the general population before the wreak havoc on everything.

Some ideas:

  • see if the company has a one-color variation of the logo (They should but may not)
  • give it it's own 'space'. Put it in a horizontal white bar across the top of the web site
  • give it some 'no mans land' padding. Like the previous idea, but more of a 'block'. Stick it on a white shape with plenty of space around each side to that it's not fighting with other elements near it.
  • camouflage it. Can you overlay it on a photo? Move it to the bottom?

As Thomas mentions, most websites will pick the main colors and use those, or go for a completely different (yet still simple) palette. These are some of the main examples I can think of.

Sites that use a related palette:

Sites that use a completely different palette:

It's difficult to come up with creative ways of working with your colors without seeing the actual logo, but I can almost say most sites you'll see will probably go for white with one or two main shades.

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    It's funny, I almost said something in my original post about logos that do have many colors always seeming to span all the hues of the rainbow and all of your first set of links followed exactly that. Interesting! – kokomaru Aug 12 '13 at 9:31

Pick two colors in the logo that stand out and work with them.

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