Colour and type decisions get made in a mood board and then break the moment they meet a real interface — an error message, a disabled button, a dark background. Design for the hard cases and the easy ones take care of themselves.
Build a palette with roles, not favourites
A working palette is not a set of colours you like. It is a set of jobs, each filled by exactly one colour.
- One primary — used sparingly, for the single most important action on any screen
- One or two neutrals — carrying the vast majority of your surface area
- A small set of semantic colours — success, warning, error, information
- Two to three tints and shades of each, so you have room to build hierarchy
If your primary appears on more than a small fraction of a screen, it stops signalling importance and becomes decoration.
Contrast is a requirement, not a preference
Light grey text on white is the most common accessibility failure in modern design, and it fails for everyone — not only for people with low vision, but for anyone reading on a phone in daylight. Check body text against its background and keep it comfortably readable.
“If your brand only works in a perfectly lit studio on a calibrated monitor, it does not work.”
— Pawan Dhillon
Choose type for reading, then for character
Your body typeface has one job: to disappear while being read at small sizes on bad screens. Personality belongs in headings, where the size gives distinctive letterforms room to be legible. Reversing this produces brands that look striking in a presentation and exhausting on a page.
Two typefaces is usually the answer
One for headings, one for body, with enough contrast between them that the pairing looks deliberate rather than accidental. A third only earns its place if it does a job the other two genuinely cannot.
Test against reality before you commit
- 1Set a full paragraph of real copy, not placeholder text
- 2Check it on a phone, outdoors if you can
- 3Build a form with a validation error in your error colour
- 4Check a disabled button — does it still read as disabled?
- 5View the whole thing in both light and dark surroundings
Pick your neutrals and your text contrast first, then choose the brand colour that survives them. Doing it the other way round is why so many palettes get quietly abandoned.
