How To Choose Colors For The Best UI Design

Last updated on January 24th, 2023

When you think you’re ready to create an intuitive UI design, you must remember there are several things to take care of to meet the required standards of the target audience. Out of all the elements that go into designing a user-friendly platform, adequate color choice is fundamental. Hence, you cannot take any chances when sitting to choose the right colors for the best UI Design.

Undoubtedly, colors are the foundational building blocks for every interface design. Coming up with a striking color scheme might seem a difficult task, especially if you aren’t too deep into graphic designing. However, in reality, the entire process is not as complicated as it’s prevalent.

Once you’re wary of practical techniques and tips, things become even more comfortable. So, this post is all about making you understand how you can select appropriate colors for UI design.

What Is UI Color Scheme?

The color scheme of UI is all about combining different colors to use in the user interface. Irrespective of the plan, almost each one of it includes the following color groups:

• Primary & Secondary Colors

These are the base colors of the UI. Primary colors are the ones that are used most frequently in the interface. Usually, the basic brand color is selected as the primary color. As a rule of thumb, experts recommend not to have more than three primary colors in the UI.

Consider this image as an example; Yelp has red as its brand color, and they have used the same in different parts of the website to highlight their brand identity.

Apart from primary colors, creating a secondary color set is another acceptable activity. Although they are optional, they can offer several new opportunities to differentiate your product. And then, by adding secondary colors, you can make your interface more attractive.

• Accent Colors:

These are the colors that are used to accentuate certain UI elements, like progress bars, buttons, or any kind of valuable information. Generally, accent colors have more saturation and brightness. Hence, they can help encourage visitors to make more interactions with the elements of your website design.

In this image below, you can see how the accent color of the floating action button has been used to highlight it visually.

• Neutrals Colors

In the entire UI design, neutral colors act as a supporting character. Usually, these colors are made for background and text. Often, neutral colors are signified by greys.

• Semantic Colors

These are the signaling colors that can be used to deliver information about warning, success, and error. Often, UI designers choose UI colors specifically for this task. For example, yellow is used for warning, green is for success, red for errors, and blue is reserved for informational messages.

Importance Of UI Colors

Apart from just enhancing your website design, there is a lot that UI design and UI colors do. With these compelling reasons, you’re sure to understand the importance that they have:

• Brand Personality Reflection

With the right set of colors, you can set the mood, fundamental tone, the conception of your products and the connotation of the brand. Accordingly, your potential customers are going to take just a few seconds to assess your products. And, a majority of them are going to make a decision based on the color scheme you’ve used. Hence, making the entire thing look appealing is undoubtedly essential.

• Better User Experience

Correct selection of colors can maintain the better readability standards of the information available on your website. Apart from that, it can also intensify the usability tremendously by enhancing navigation, strengthening CTA buttons, satisfying the aesthetic requirements of users, and stimulating natural interactions.

• Impact On Purchasing Decision

According to specific studies, the visual appearance of products can influence the purchasing decisions of customers enormously. And then, let’s just not forget the kind of assessment color combination gets when customers are pondering over a product. Owing to this, several companies are integrating UI design colors into their marketing strategies to obtain better results. Considering that, a designer should come true on a UI design test that helps know a designer’s ability to apply design thinking including color schemes.

Here Are Few Tips To Choose UI Colors Seamlessly

Now that you’ve gained the basic understanding of color schemes in UI designs, now is the time to comprehend how you can select amazingly striking colors to attract most of your potential customers.

01. Consider The Working Of Colors

There are certain colors that go amazingly well with each other, while some others look blah. If you aren’t considering this fact, you may end up designing such an interface that might turn off your users instantly. Fortunately, there’s a straightforward way that you can use to create a pleasant color combination.

With the help of traditional color scheme patterns, like analogous, monochromatic, and complementary, you can create a scheme that would work correctly with your product.

• Analogous schemes are designed by using three different colors that are present next to each other on the color wheel.

• Monochromatic color schemes are created from different shades, tints, and tones within a specific hue.

• Complementary schemes can be produced by uniting colors from the color wheel’s opposite sides. In the necessary forms, these schemes comprise only two colors. However, you can expand it by using different shades, tints, and tones.

02. Pay Attention To Color Psychology

One crucial factor that you must keep in mind is that psychology plays an essential role in the entire process of UI colors. The more attractive the color is, the more influenced your customers will be. If you weren’t aware of it, colors would stimulate the emotions and mood of humans.

Every color resembles a different emotion. Also, one thing that you should remember is that different people perceive colors differently as well. Hence, factors like gender, age, and more should also be considered when you choose UI colors.

03. Distribute Colors According To The 60-30-10 Rule

Whether you have an expanded color palette, or a limited one, creating a balanced color scheme can be a bit difficult. Most of the times, people experience problems with color proportions, as it might be strenuous for them to understand the percentage that should be used in UI design.

When you feel stuck, a simple rule, 60-30-10, can turn out to be a savior for you. This rule is known to help you create a harmonious scheme. By using this technique, you can balance the composition.

Combine the colors in the proportion of 60% – 30% – 10%. So, keep the dominant color in 60%, use 30% for the secondary color, and keep accent color in a proportion of 10%.

04. Don’t Forget Accessibility

When you create a UI design, apart from matching the color scheme with beautiful WordPress themes or other elements, you must also ensure an amazing experience for users. And, it can only be achieved if your design is accessible by a different group of users, even those who are dealing with visual impairment.

These foundational rules should be kept in mind while making the design accessible:

• Text should be legible when it appears on a colored background

• Sufficient color contrast between elements should be there

• Text should be as useful as the color around

With this, developing a striking color scheme would be a seamless job.

05. Restrict The Total Number Of Colors

A lot of things depend upon the kind of balance you create while applying colors to the UI design. Usually, the more colors you select, the difficult it will be to obtain a balance. That’s the reason why experts recommend its use as little number as possible.

For some platforms, such as mobile apps, you can even work amazingly by using one primary color if you’ve got the hold on adequate tricks. You can create a color scheme by using light and dark variants of the primary color. Or, if you need a different appearance, you can lower the brightness and increase saturation to obtain the darker version.

Similarly, you can play around with the primary color and decrease the use of different colors in the design.

06. Reflect Your Brand’s Personality

Whether you’ve selected the best of beautiful WordPress themes or you’re designing a UI design, irrespective of what you do with your business, it’s important to let the brand reflect in everything. So, when you’re choosing colors, make sure that you achieve consistency.

Keep in mind that you’re going to use that color scheme for your logo design, social media banners and images, mobile app designs, and for other things as well. So, it’s better not to mess the color scheme to avoid regretting later.

Conclusion

Inevitably, color is the keystone of every UI design. So, when you brainstorm over the best color scheme, you must ensure that there are no wrong choices. More than the selection, the way you are going to use the colors matter the most as well.

Thus, it’s hugely recommended not to hurry up and execute such a design that doesn’t match any of your business standards. Let the designers take their time with the color palette and come up with such a scheme that would attract your potential customers instantly and increase the conversion rate as well.

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