7 Practical Colour Principles for Designing App Interfaces

A simple checklist of time-tested ideas for product designers

Image Credits: Pixabay | Source: Pexels.com

“Anyone who has ever felt blue, seen red, blacked out, or turned green knows we’re prone to make emotional associations with different shades.”

— Winifred Gallagher

You’ve covered the basics of Colour Theory and are excited to design your first app. You’re looking at some great colour combinations to use in your app. Great! But in practice, the advice ‘use a complementary colour scheme’ has little practical bearing on whether you would eventually end up with a good-looking design.

So how do you apply colour theory in practice as a UI designer? How do you leverage time-tested principles and not reinvent the wheel every time you’re making a prototype? This is what made me write this.

This post is a small attempt at creating a bridge between theory and practice, to get to a practical rulebook at applying colour principles in app design. I am writing this as a guide to beginners in design, including myself.

The essential question that I am trying to answer here is: How do I pare down colour theory to a few (limited) core design tenets, so as to create a repeatable system or framework for app design?

Of course, as with anything in design, the choice of colour(s) for your app needs to take into consideration the users and

• the mood and perception you want to convey
• the emotions and behaviours you want to elicit
• the brand identity & personality, tone of messaging, and industry
• the cultural associations of different colours in general (and in the target geography in particular).

These preliminary checks are a must for designers before moving on to the finer nuances. But we’re not talking about all that here. We are looking at some generic, context-independent UI ground rules.

To keep it short and sweet, I will not cover any colour theory basics in this post and have deliberately attempted to make the pointers as succinct as possible. If you’re new to colour theory or want a relook at the basics, check out the below article.