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Eugene Arutyunov
Color Under a Purple Lightbulb
The familiar problem with digital-first brands looks like this.
To serve interface scenarios, you need a palette that’s very functional and flexible to requirements. It doesn’t matter what the brand’s primary colors are — an error will still be red, success will still be green, and the background color will depend on the user’s preferred theme, which might even change twice a day.
But to build a brand (that is, to create a user experience and accompany it with sensory input unlike anything else), you need the opposite: a controlled, simple, strong color signal. 20th-century branding is, more or less, picking a color and painting everything that color for years and years. Like Coca-Cola.
So the requirement for a digital brand’s color palette is to find an elegant solution to this problem.
And our solution is this: we give up on one fixed “brand” color and adapt the palette to the needs of the interface, because those come first — including using colors to visualize data (emotions, for example). But at the same time, we mentally keep a purple lightbulb switched on somewhere in our heads, illuminating an otherwise neutral palette. In other words, we subtly tint everything purple.