Teal Color Palette Ideas With Hex Codes for Canva and Branding

There’s this thing about the teal color that many people love about. Every time I talk colors with my clients, partners, friends, all of them will mention “teal” at least once as an option for their brand.

It’s a great color for sure, we all gravitate to that because great brands use it and hence may have translated to us as “since they use it, we should use it to look good”. Tiffany & Co., Canva, Clinique, all have that teal shade in their brand logos.

The problem is, no matter how lovely a color is, it doesn’t work alone. It pairs with other elements and colors surrounding it.

It looks good on it’s own, but we have to choose the right shade of teal and other supporting colors to work with this particular teal.

Hence, I’d like to help you with this guide, by the end of this, you’ll know which is your teal HEX code, which teal shade suits your brand, what to pair it with and exactly how to use those colors in Canva.

What Color Is Teal?

There’s nothing much I have to say about this color other than showing you the color itself. Here it goes:

The classic teal HEX code is #008080, it’s the middle one in the above visual.

There’s no one teal color that people are using in branding, that’s because it’s like a spectrum where teal moves along a continuum like this:

bluer ← #007C83 → #008080 → #087F6D → greener

8 Useful Shades of Teal With HEX Codes

Refer to this chart if you are looking for the teal shade to match your brand’s theme. Here are some examples:

1. Balanced: Classic Teal
2. Sophisticated: Deep Teal
3. Strong and premium: Dark Teal
4. Clean and modern: Blue Teal
5. Organic: Green Teal
6. Muted: Dusty Teal
7. Friendly: Light Teal
8. Energetic: Bright Teal

All teals work well as primary colors, accent, background, even for your text in your marketing materials.

12 Teal Color Palette Ideas I Use For Branding Projects

Classic Teal

Dark Teal Palette

#083d3d – Very Dark Cyan / Deep Teal
#145A5A – Dark Teal / Deep Sea
#D8Cbb8 – Pastel Gray / Pastel Earth / Berber (a warm, grayish-orange neutral)
#c96F4a – Cork Wood / Moderate Orange (a muted, terracotta-like autumn shade)
#172425 – Very Dark Slate Green / Gunmetal Black (close to black shade with faint blue-green undertones)

Teal and Peach

Teal and Orange

Teal and Brown

Teal and Coral

Pink and Teal

Purple and Teal

Teal and Black

Teal and Gold

Teal and Sage

Teal and Warm Neutrals

What five colors Go Best with teal

When clients ask me this, I always tell them not to choose the five colors, but to choose five jobs to be done instead. What do I mean by that?

The teal color may not be such an easy color to pair with, and that’s also why it stands out very well. It’s also the reason why when you start with teal, and put your other favorite individual colors with it, the whole brand looks off.

My solution to my clients trying to change their brand colors or building a new brand look is to figure out what do they wish each color can accomplish.

Here’s an example:

Say now you want to refresh your brand colors and you do what you normally do: Go to Pinterest, find five colors you love such as: deep teal, dusty pink, burnt orange, sage green, cream.

These colors look beautiful on their own, so you are excited and added them to your Canva design and start designing your social media posts.

On your first Instagram post, teal becomes the background and orange becomes the headline.

On the next one, sage becomes the background, pink becomes the headline and teal becomes a tiny accent.

Then you design your lead magnet. This time you use orange for the buttons, pink for the headings and cream for everything else.

Technically, you’re still using the same five colors.

But your brand becomes inconsistent, not with the colors. The colors are not the problem, but the use of the colors is the issue here.

Instead of thinking that these five colors are your brand colors, you should give every color a specific task that it will be doing.

Deep teal could be the whole package, while sage could be supporting teal, not going to appear more than teal. Burnt orange could be for buttons, links, highlights. Warm cream could be the background and charcoal could be for headings and text.

In this way, you won’t see five buttons with five different colors in your website, but just at most two colors (one light color on a dark background and one darker color on a lighter background).

What to Check Before a Teal Palette Is Done

Check 1: Hue

Do the colors actually harmonize?

Check 2: Saturation

Are all five colors bold and too loud at the same time?

Too much:

bright teal + bright orange + bright yellow

versus

Better:

deep teal + burnt orange + cream

Check 3: Value

Do you have enough light-dark variation?

For any brand to stand out, there must be that contrast or texture in the color differences to show some character in the brand.

Grayscale Test

Screenshot the palette.

Turn it black and white.

Can you still see clear differences between your primary, background and text colors?

If everything turns into nearly the same gray, your palette may look colorful but still lack usable contrast.