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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 en

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.

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.