Colours that work together Pantone 2022 colours

[FixedWire]

Make it pretty, don't reinvent ugly. Getting colours that work together is not always an engineers' forte. Cheat!

 

https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2022-palette-exploration

 

 

[ng1902]

Here are a bunch of other web resources for colors & UI Design:

Data Visualization

Since LabVIEW tends to get used a lot in industrial, scientific, and academic settings, it's pretty common that we need to display data in a clear & understandable way. There are a bunch of resources for picking color schemes to represent data to improve contrast, readability, and accessibility (such as colorblind safe palette).

Color Brewer: A useful website with a variety of color schemes for displaying data. Has options for sequential datasets, diverging, and qualitative. As well, it shows whether the selected color set is colorblind friendly, print friendly, or photocopy friendly. 

matplotlib colourmaps: Technically a python resource, but colors are colors. matplotlib is one of the most widely used python libraries for data visualization in python, and they've put a ton of effort into designing good color schemes. There's another library called seaborn that is based on matplotlib that has some more color palettes.

Tristen's HCL Picker: A color palette picker which lets you choose colors that are evenly spaced in hue, chroma, or in lightness. This tool is really useful for generating palettes with good contrast.

Fundamentals of Data Visualization: A book with lots of useful information on data visualization, from colors to plot styles and more.

 

Design Palettes

Making data readable isn't the only thing that matters, sometimes you want to have pretty UIs too. Some handy resources are:

Adobe Color Tools: Has a color wheel for designing your own palettes. A tool to extract color themes & gradients from an image (drag/drop a clients logo in there to get a palette based on their company colors), and a tool for checking color contrast for readability.

coolors.co: A website with a ton of color palettes to pick from. 

Material Design Color System: Material Design is primarily meant for mobile & web apps, but the design principles can apply to any application really. The Material Design guidelines have good tips on making intuitive UIs, and provides a palette of nice looking colors.

Material Design Palette: To go along with the above. Select your primary & accent colors, and this website returns a palette.

colormind.io: A neat website that procedurally generates color palettes. Lock in one or two colors and let the website pick the rest of the palette.

mycolor.space: Similar to colormind.io, this auto-generates a palette. ColorSpace takes in a single color and returns several matching palettes.

 

Icons

Lastly, good icons can be a great finishing touch. Maybe it's just because I've been using LabVIEW for so long, but I find LabVIEWs icons to be a bit dated.

Material Design Icons: A website with a ton of free icons, able to be downloaded as pngs. Adds a nice touch to UI elements.

FontAwesome: Has about 1700 free icons. With a subscription, has almost 15k.

icons8: Has something like 875,000 icons. Free to use as long as you credit & link to icons8 in an 'About' page.

[jacobson]

If you're working for a larger customer they also might have brand guidelines that you can follow. A long time ago I worked with someone from UT Austin and just followed their published branding material.

https://brand.utexas.edu/identity/color/

[Tim_S]

There is a significant amount of the population that has some amount of colorblindness. It's not a bad idea to take screenshots of your UI and then convert the image to greyscale.