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The beauty of using a limited color palette

Reducing the number of options leads to faster decisions.

Christian Behler
UX Collective
4 min readOct 16, 2020
An image of a limited color palette with 40 different colors spread evenly across all hues.
A limited color palette with only 40 colors to choose from, image by author.

Have you ever picked a color? Did you spend 5 minutes adjusting the shade very slightly back and forth and contemplated whether it’s the correct tone? Is #777777 the right shade of grey or is #787878 better? Sometimes there are so many options that you cannot decide which color is the best for the situation. This is where a limited color palette can be helpful. When you need some shade of light green and there is only one light green color available, it’s very easy and fast to choose and move on to the next decision.

Limited Color Palette

Most modern image processing programs and monitors use 8-bit colors but recently 10-bit and even 12-bit colors have been becoming more common. As you can imagine from the name, 8-bit colors use 8 bits for each of the three color channels red, green, and blue. This means 256 distinct values for every channel and 256³=16.7 million total colors. With 12-bit channels, the total number goes up to 68.7 billion. These are very large numbers and when we manually have to pick a color from this many options, it can get overwhelming very quickly.

A limited color palette limits the total number of colors down to a more reasonable number. It becomes a lot easier…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Christian Behler

M. Sc. Computer Science and Physics, Indie Game/Software/Web Developer, Writer, 3D Artist, and too many other interests. https://pingpoli.medium.com/membership

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