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Hmm, but 90's UI design got by with far fewer shades. Windows 95 has at most seven colours[0] used in the UI aside from the desktop background and icons, and ye

Hmm, but 90's UI design got by with far fewer shades. Windows 95 has at most seven colours[0] used in the UI aside from the desktop background and icons, and yet it had a very clear visual hierarchy compared to today's designs. [0] light gray, dark gray, white, black, navy blue, the other gray (scrollbars), the light yellow used for help text backgrounds

zer0tonin 6y ago
Honestly I don't think this opinion is shared by a majority of users.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  I don't know what the “majority of users” think. What I can say is that not knowing if something was a button was not a problem Windows 9x had.
  - allenu 6y ago
    You can make a usable product using a Windows 95 palette, but I think it may look outdated to users. Depending on your target market, the color scheme you use can have an effect on how your product is perceived by your potential customers. User tastes and expectations have become more sophisticated since the 90s and users expect a higher level of polish now than back then. That can include color choice as a part of overall branding.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
      It must be possible to achieve a happy medium: something with the legibility of an older design that doesn't look dated or unpolished. (Though I reject the notion that 90's designs weren't sophisticated or polished.) It doesn't need to limit itself to six colours, but I'm not convinced that an endless series of shades with low contrast to one another is good design from a functional perspective.
  - Veen 6y ago
    Because buttons weren't distinguished by color in Windows 9x, but by borders and shadows. You can do that on the web too, but this article is about color.
- hedora 6y ago
  I’m not sure what you mean by “opinion”. It was definitely more clear what was a button, vs tree, etc. in old Windows UIs, where there was exactly one standard. In the modern web, each application reimplements the widgets from scratch. Certainly, that’s less clear than a well thought out standard set of UI elements.
  - SebastianKra 6y ago
    You should focus less on whether you can identify each individual widget and more on what they mean. Lets look at Word 95: https://live.staticflickr.com/5161/5199339764_7a2b6036eb_b.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/5161/5199339764_7a2b6036eb_b.j... Ah, yes... many buttons. I can see that there are buttons. What do they mean? Dunno. But, yep - they're definitely buttons. Now let's look at Pages. (Admittedly, I myself am still not 100% happy with Big Sur's look) https://ibb.co/0MKRcPd https://ibb.co/0MKRcPd No! How am I supposed to know what I can click on? Never mind the fact that everything is much better labeled and structured. How will I ever remember that the row of icons at the top are actually a toolbar. I could go on about other aspects in which Win95 falls short, but this sums it up quite nicely. No, standardized widgets are not the most important aspect of an interface and no, Win95 was not the peak of design.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
      I honestly don't see why the Pages example would be a big improvement over Word. The labelled sections for the broad categories of formatting are nice, I guess, but I'm not sure they're a good use of screen space, especially given the individual formatting options are, just like Word 95, represented only by icons and unlabelled drop-down boxes. In either UI you have to hover over buttons if you're not sure what they're mean, and it's telling that the iconography is essentially unchanged from the 1990's. Except for one quite important aspect: Word 95's icons use colour to help the eye read them and distinguish them from one another. I know what the Pages icons mean but it's harder to quickly find the right icon when the only difference between the icons is shape. By the way, if you really want that more spaced-out and verbose vertical list of formatting options, Word has it too, at least in 97 (haven't used 95). It's available as a dialog box and actually offers more formatting options than Pages does. Moreover, the Word 95 UI's compactness is valuable. You can quickly find all the formatting options you'll ever need without clicking around in menus. Most of the screen space is occupied not by UI text and padding but by commonly-used commands and useful information about the document. Since the icons are laid out close together and horizontally rather than vertically, it's also easier for my eyes to quickly scan them than in Pages. It's not nostalgia speaking when I say that I'd much prefer to use Word 95 on a daily basis than Pages.
tomtheelder 6y ago
I think it's implied, but unstated, that this guide is for picking a palette for an app that follows modern design trends. The choice of a slack-like UI reinforces that. You can get away with many fewer colors if you use different design language, but very few (not none, but few) apps are built with those sorts of aesthetics.
helmholtz 6y ago
I don't see what one gains by limiting the number of shades of colour when designing a professional app (as opposed to a personal/art project where one might enjoy constraints). Just a mental satisfaction of 'I used less!'? Multiple colours cost nothing, don't incur performance penalties, but do help make the UI look prettier and more finished. I'd be way more likely to spend time in an app if it looked beautiful, and by almost any metric, Windows 95 was not a thing of beauty. It had clarity, I agree, but it was far from the pinnacle of what humanity can achieve.
- HelloNurse 6y ago
  One gains consistency. Various categories of content have exactly the same colour: light backgrounds and dark text and borders (or vice versa), different hues (e.g. traffic lights red, yellow and green like in the article) for specific text and box meanings. Nothing should have an ambiguous or arbitrary colour. For example, the HN comment editing page can get away with 3 or 4 gray shades plus some in browser UI elements because they are completely unrelated objects: main background, button background (darker than main background, needs to be just noticeably different), dark grey text (also darker than main background, needs to be legible) and dark grey arrows (not text and not buttons, and therefore not necessarily matching the text and button shades).
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  There may need to be more than one shade of a colour, but having a large number of shades suggests to me that the design has too many subtle contrasts in brightness. Regarding colour generally, I think it's a useful tool and it is nice that it's used more in certain respects than in the 90's, but I'm not convinced in general that “modern” design makes the best use of it. For example, use of more than one colour within UI icons has become uncool because it's less pretty, despite it making them harder to read and distinguish. Function has taken a backseat to æsthetics.

zer0tonin 6y ago

Honestly I don't think this opinion is shared by a majority of users.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
I don't know what the “majority of users” think. What I can say is that not knowing if something was a button was not a problem Windows 9x had.
- allenu 6y ago
  You can make a usable product using a Windows 95 palette, but I think it may look outdated to users. Depending on your target market, the color scheme you use can have an effect on how your product is perceived by your potential customers. User tastes and expectations have become more sophisticated since the 90s and users expect a higher level of polish now than back then. That can include color choice as a part of overall branding.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
    It must be possible to achieve a happy medium: something with the legibility of an older design that doesn't look dated or unpolished. (Though I reject the notion that 90's designs weren't sophisticated or polished.) It doesn't need to limit itself to six colours, but I'm not convinced that an endless series of shades with low contrast to one another is good design from a functional perspective.
- Veen 6y ago
  Because buttons weren't distinguished by color in Windows 9x, but by borders and shadows. You can do that on the web too, but this article is about color.
hedora 6y ago
I’m not sure what you mean by “opinion”. It was definitely more clear what was a button, vs tree, etc. in old Windows UIs, where there was exactly one standard. In the modern web, each application reimplements the widgets from scratch. Certainly, that’s less clear than a well thought out standard set of UI elements.
- SebastianKra 6y ago
  You should focus less on whether you can identify each individual widget and more on what they mean. Lets look at Word 95: https://live.staticflickr.com/5161/5199339764_7a2b6036eb_b.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/5161/5199339764_7a2b6036eb_b.j... Ah, yes... many buttons. I can see that there are buttons. What do they mean? Dunno. But, yep - they're definitely buttons. Now let's look at Pages. (Admittedly, I myself am still not 100% happy with Big Sur's look) https://ibb.co/0MKRcPd https://ibb.co/0MKRcPd No! How am I supposed to know what I can click on? Never mind the fact that everything is much better labeled and structured. How will I ever remember that the row of icons at the top are actually a toolbar. I could go on about other aspects in which Win95 falls short, but this sums it up quite nicely. No, standardized widgets are not the most important aspect of an interface and no, Win95 was not the peak of design.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
    I honestly don't see why the Pages example would be a big improvement over Word. The labelled sections for the broad categories of formatting are nice, I guess, but I'm not sure they're a good use of screen space, especially given the individual formatting options are, just like Word 95, represented only by icons and unlabelled drop-down boxes. In either UI you have to hover over buttons if you're not sure what they're mean, and it's telling that the iconography is essentially unchanged from the 1990's. Except for one quite important aspect: Word 95's icons use colour to help the eye read them and distinguish them from one another. I know what the Pages icons mean but it's harder to quickly find the right icon when the only difference between the icons is shape. By the way, if you really want that more spaced-out and verbose vertical list of formatting options, Word has it too, at least in 97 (haven't used 95). It's available as a dialog box and actually offers more formatting options than Pages does. Moreover, the Word 95 UI's compactness is valuable. You can quickly find all the formatting options you'll ever need without clicking around in menus. Most of the screen space is occupied not by UI text and padding but by commonly-used commands and useful information about the document. Since the icons are laid out close together and horizontally rather than vertically, it's also easier for my eyes to quickly scan them than in Pages. It's not nostalgia speaking when I say that I'd much prefer to use Word 95 on a daily basis than Pages.

tomtheelder 6y ago

I think it's implied, but unstated, that this guide is for picking a palette for an app that follows modern design trends. The choice of a slack-like UI reinforces that. You can get away with many fewer colors if you use different design language, but very few (not none, but few) apps are built with those sorts of aesthetics.

helmholtz 6y ago

I don't see what one gains by limiting the number of shades of colour when designing a professional app (as opposed to a personal/art project where one might enjoy constraints). Just a mental satisfaction of 'I used less!'? Multiple colours cost nothing, don't incur performance penalties, but do help make the UI look prettier and more finished. I'd be way more likely to spend time in an app if it looked beautiful, and by almost any metric, Windows 95 was not a thing of beauty. It had clarity, I agree, but it was far from the pinnacle of what humanity can achieve.

HelloNurse 6y ago
One gains consistency. Various categories of content have exactly the same colour: light backgrounds and dark text and borders (or vice versa), different hues (e.g. traffic lights red, yellow and green like in the article) for specific text and box meanings. Nothing should have an ambiguous or arbitrary colour. For example, the HN comment editing page can get away with 3 or 4 gray shades plus some in browser UI elements because they are completely unrelated objects: main background, button background (darker than main background, needs to be just noticeably different), dark grey text (also darker than main background, needs to be legible) and dark grey arrows (not text and not buttons, and therefore not necessarily matching the text and button shades).
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
There may need to be more than one shade of a colour, but having a large number of shades suggests to me that the design has too many subtle contrasts in brightness. Regarding colour generally, I think it's a useful tool and it is nice that it's used more in certain respects than in the 90's, but I'm not convinced in general that “modern” design makes the best use of it. For example, use of more than one colour within UI icons has become uncool because it's less pretty, despite it making them harder to read and distinguish. Function has taken a backseat to æsthetics.