The Most Important Color Rules for UI Design

If you are studying design and aspire to build your career in it, then chances are you must have heard of UI Design – User Interface Design. It is the look, feel, and layout of a digital product, one that focuses on how buttons, text, images, and screens appear and respond on devices. This makes the user interaction smooth and clear.

What’s more important is that, if you’ve heard of User Interface Design, then you must know that ‘Color’ is perhaps one of the most important elements of UI Design. Most designers who are just starting in their careers find an elegant palette online and incorporate the color into their designs. What their inexperience prevents them from considering, though, is that branding, functionality, and accessibility issues, such as color blindness, matter.

With that in mind, this article helps newly formed designers learn about the most important color rules for UI design. This article builds on the back of a handy list compiled by London-based product designer Zander Whitehurst. His advice is to categorize your color palette into brand, functional, feedback, accent, and neutral colors.

So, let’s dive into some of the most important color rules to remember for UI design, which Whitehurst also covers, including contrast, legibility, and color blindness.

What Are the Most Important Color Rules for UI Design?

1. Brand

You should have a single brand color that users immediately associate with your product. Just look at Apple, which uses White-Grey, or Cadbury, with its distinct and popular purple color, or Spotify, with its Green-Black imagery. Focusing on a color and making it your brand identity is very crucial. Buttons are a great way to incorporate brand color.

2. Functional

Functional colors are the most vital component of the interface’s architecture. They are usually used across navigation, tables, modals, dialogues, texts, links, and states. As well as components, functional colors are used within type, from headings to links.

3. Feedback

Feedback colors are used to indicate the state of an action. In simpler words, they give users feedback. Typical feedback options are success, warning, danger, and info. However, there are primary and secondary versions of this.

4. Accent

Accent colors are the ones with higher brightness and saturation than other colors in your palette. They are used to highlight copy, metrics, and important information.

5. Neutral

Neutral colors are the bookends of your color palette. Keeping it simple with a single light and dark color with opacity shades will save hours. When possible, try to drop the alpha of colors rather than adding another light or dark shade.

6. Interactions

This is important during the build phase of a UI. Hover and active states are usually forgotten until then. You need to choose your interaction colors with a percentage layer of neutral colors in your design system symbols.

7. Contrast

Make sure your colors, visuals, and typography work hand-in-hand, providing great readability, legibility, and contrast. Within your UI, you need to hit Level AA, which requires a contrast ratio of 4:5:1.

8. Colorblind

And last but not least, we have Colorblind. There are 8 types of color blindness. Accessibility is such an important factor in your UI, and colors play a huge role. Stark is a great plugin to check the accessibility of your colors.

Make sure to learn these rules and apply them whenever you work with UI design.