UX & UI Explained: Safe Colors…Should we still follow them?!
Hello everyone! Hope you’re doing well and having a great week. Today i’ll be talking a little bit about the Safe Colors dilema.
First of all…What are Safe Colors?
Safe colors, as the name suggests, are colors which are considered safe to use in User Interfaces in terms of Contrast Ratio and Balance to the future Users of the App, Product, etc… But more and more, these Safe Colors are being explored and to be honest, after seeing lots and lots of Landing Page Designs and UI Kits, it makes anyone a bit confused about this “rule”.
Color Matters?
Of course! More than you imagine… The Colors are directly related with Psychology. Probably you’ve heard the term “Psychology of Colors” before and it does not exist just because. It really helps in your Design Workflow.
How about Color Contrast Ratio’s?
This is all a question of Designing for Accessibility. This aspect is related with the contrast you make between for example, Text and Background in a Webpage.
Avoid to use extremely powerful colors together. there must always be an intermediate balance between the chosen colors for your Design System, UI kit, Brand… Basically everything you design.
This aspect is unconsciously trained in your brain through the years, but there are always tools that could help you understand better how it works, like Colorable.
“If one says ‘Red’ (the name of the color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.”
– Josef Albers
The Dark Mode Dilema
These rules are constantly being tested by big brands Like Apple, Google, Facebook and more. Even if is in their OS’s (for example iOS and Android), if you check their UI Dark Mode Systems, they’re actually very different in terms of Safe Colors and Contrast.
For example, in Facebook Messenger Dark Mode, are often used really strong colors which go a little bit agains the logic of the Safe Colors, as you can see below.
But at the same time, they are perfectly readable in our screens, and our everyday routines. So this makes me divided between two questions.
- Are the Safe Colors being a little bit forgotten and we are focusing more in beautiful UI’s more than ever?
- Or the Safe Colors are being “Updated” for the “Modern Times”?
In conclusion
This article is supposed to make you think a little about the subject and maybe put some theories in practice. It’s more than proved that the real color psychology is getting forgotten and what matters is to have a beautiful and eye-catchy User Interface. But don’t forget, it still has to be readable.
Hope you enjoyed it and thank you so much for reading!
