Designing Effectively With Colours

I’ve been reading a lot in the past few weeks on colours and how to use them in your designs to make them sleek effectively. Colours give life to the design and guide the user to take selected action, It reaffirms the company brand. We can say colour is one of the building blocks of Design.

When dealing with colour in designs, less is more sometimes. Before we go into that, you'd probably want to ask, how do I choose colour when designing? I’d be sharing a few tips on how you can Choose colours for your next design project;

1. Use the Company Colour; If this is a freelance Job or an already existing company, use the colours that represent the company (the company brand colour). You’d not want your design to speak a different language from what the company represents.
2. Understand the goal of your design; In a situation where you don't have a brand colour or guide to follow through, you’d have to do an in-depth study to understand the message you want your design to pass. This is where Color psychology, you’d want to understand each colour and what they represent.
3. Use automated tools; coolors.co, adobe wheels and google material design are tools you'd like to try out to generate colours for your next design.
4. Find Inspiration; If everything else doesn't work for you, find inspiration around you. Nature is one of the best places for colour inspiration.

Now you have gotten a Color for your designs, How do you implement the colours effectively:

1. Create colour palette: you might want to start by creating different shades of your primary colours. To indicate your active and inactive states of the button. You could also decide to make use of a monochromatic colour (i.e. using just one colour and assisting it with white or black)

2. Don’t use more than three colours on a design: there are exceptional cases like neubrutalism or when you have gained mastery of the art of colours.

3. White is a safe colour, sometimes play safe

4. Be consistent in your colours

5. Design for Accessibility; I’d speak more about this in my next article.

If there is anything I missed in the article, do well to share in the comment session.

There’s no better way to get better at using colours than to practice and play around with colours consistently and in no time, you'd become better at it.

For now, keep smashing and crushing those pixels, Adios amigos.