Fundamentals of color in user interface design (UI)

Simple rules to get a professional color scheme.

Color is a sensory impression that the eyes perceive from the light, translating in a diverse form of concepts and emotions. For artists, its correct manipulation has been of great importance, so it has been theorized in many ways and with different methods throughout history.

Painting, printing, photography, graphic design and interface design use color theory to evoke specific ideas and concepts, taking advantage of the non-verbal capacity of color as opposed to other slower forms of communication.

In interface design, color psychology is used to influence the perceptions a user may have, from reinforcing brand recognition to generating more clicks on the purchase button. Other important results, such as improved usability, can also be the result of good color mastery.

One of the digital languages to modify the color is the HSL format. The color may change due to its hue, saturation and lightness. These three axes give us all the colors of the digital world that are then reinterpreted in a hexadecimal number or an RGB code.

In this article I write about six considerations that I regularly use for color selection when I design an interface.

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Specific colors are linked to certain emotions, but not always. Since we are born our eyes learn about the colors of the real world, with time the memory associates these colors with certain experiences and elements. This familiarity can give the user some context about the goal of the interface.

The Me. Sleep. application used colors related to the night sky to facilitate the understanding of the concept. The range of five blues and purples in the design evokes memories about the experience of going to sleep.

This, of course, is not an absolute, since human perception of reality is very different and cannot be generalized in all its forms. The German artist Joseph Albers in his methodical book, Interaction of Color, points out that the main strong characteristic of color is the relativity. Red in the west countries may represent danger and evil, but in China it means happiness, joy and celebration. Despite this, he also states that certain colors are perceived by a large number of people in the same way, such as the green color related to ecology or pink as a sign of femininity.