Using Colors That Fit
Color is a powerful tool in UI Design. We can use it to highlight an idea, to provoke an emotional response from the user or to draw attention to a specific part of your website. This is in addition to making our website or app esthetically pleasing to the eye.
In many cases, the color scheme we choose will also reflect the company's branding and values. The color scheme can contribute to the overall brand perception of products or services. Based on research by CCICOLOR, the Institute of Color Research, users judge products online within the first 90 seconds of their initial view. Between 62% and 90% of this judgment will be based upon the color scheme. Red reflects power, passion, and energy. It can be used to alert the user or attract the user's attention in a design or brand. Orange can mean friendship, unification, and youth. Yellow reflects happiness and enthusiasm. Yellow is the primary color that we associate with the sun. Green reflects growth and the environment. Blue reflects calm, safety, and reliability and people tend to feel more at ease with it.
Color plays its part in delivering a better user experience. The right choice of color will ensure the usability and legibility of information displayed on screen. The right contrast between text and background is an essential part of the user experience. if users can't read the content easily, they're going to go elsewhere. Think for a moment about red text on a blue background. That color combination is hard to read, our eyes can't focus on these shades at the same time. The same goes for blue text on a red background. The colors vibrate, making us strain our eyes. We have another tool. You can also give less importance to text by reducing the level of contrast compared to the background, helping the reader skip through non-essential text when skimming or speed reading. The vibrancy of a color can help instill an emotional experience. Bright colors give energy and a sense of immediacy. News websites often use red text to call attention to breaking or important news. Softer, less vibrant colors can help a user be more relaxed when approaching navigation.
To achieve a harmonious color scheme, it's important to focus on the details of the colors chosen. We can create many variations of a single hue on the color wheel. Make a tint by adding white to the hue, a shade by adding black, and tonality by adding gray. The easiest scheme in which to achieve balance through tints, shades and tones is the monochromatic scheme. Colors on opposite sides of the color wheel offer the greatest level of contrast. Contrast can be used to achieve balance or to draw a user's attention to a certain feature or area of text. Be careful when using contrast, overdo it and you're more likely to confuse users than to help them. We can use the brightness of a color to add additional emotional content to a color with brighter shades, generally reflecting increased energy and positive emotions, such as happiness, and darker shades, offering reduced energy and thus calmer, quieter spaces.
We choose modern color schemes based on the systems used to display or print designs. The two most common systems are CMYK ( Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ) and RGB ( Red, Green and Blue ). CMYK is a subtractive color system in that, in the absence of any of the four colors, the output is white. Colors are calculated including black as a percentage of each of the four colors. CMYK is typically used for print. RGB, on the other hand, is an additive system. It begins with black, and colors are added to achieve hues up to and including white. The values of each color are assigned from 1 to 256 and offer more than 16 million combinations for the palette. This is because RGB is typically used on digital screens, and the underlying system is based on binary pairs.
It's worth noting that, from a human eye's perspective, there's little difference between the two palettes. Our eyes can distinguish all 10 million colors created by the CMYK scale, but the 16 million of the RGB scale often differ too subtly for the eye to tell the difference. Neither palette is better than the other from a visual perspective. The difference is important from a design perspective because the two systems are used to produce different outputs, print and screen. Conversion between the two systems can be imprecise and yield varying results when viewed.
Color is a powerful tool for you. Choosing a color scheme for a website or app is important for branding. As a designer, we can optimize user experiences by choosing the right colors. This will help to ensure usability, legibility and give the user an emotional experience to connect with. Using colors to our advantage means knowing what goes into them.