Color Palette Must Be Humane

High contrast colors are difficult for the human eye to perceive. This is particularly true when reading and understanding big datasets, grids, tables, etc. The best formatting for homogeneous text is simple, almost black text (#333 according to RGB color model) on a white or light grey background.

Things become more complicated when we need to highlight different parts of the grid for emphasis. A good font and background color balance must be maintained to make text distinct and readable at the same time. Let’s see how OpenOffice helps us with this task:

Okay, let’s choose one of the first options for colored backgrounds from the second line:

Weird. Typically we don’t have enough time to search for the best solution by trying and analyzing different variants, so we think that current choice is acceptable and continue to the next task. We often prefer to solve our highlighting problems with the proposed presets on the color palette panel, and do not make use of the full color palette to find the best variants in the whole RGB space. Many of us have seen tables with coloring similar to the above screen. This is not due to the user’s bad graphic design skills, but mostly because of lack of easily applicable nice looking presets.

I spent 2 minutes to find an appropriate color that is similar to this button:

using color pallette in Axure RP, prototyping software:

It looks far from perfect. I found a similar color in the bottom left square, and tried all other groups because I did’t see separate groups for colors. Moreover, most of the variants are useless for everyday tasks like button and rectangles coloring, for example:

Sure, we may rarely need such color, but most of the time we need less bright colors, so I would like to have a better choice of predefined colors. But you can’t change the color palette in Axure, despite it being used for user interface designing too. I would like to see presets like this:

with good color sorting and some kind of Photoshop color pallette for any advanced coloring needs:

There is a perfect solution for coloring in the latest versions of MS Office, so you can quickly pick a nice-looking color scheme:

and get a results that cover 90% of all needs in just 1 second:

Additionally, I would like to be able to checkmark “Adapt font color automatically,” so when I choose a background, the software finds an appropriate font color without any need to set it manually. It would also be helpful to easily invert the colors, if needed.

The software should also note if the selected color may be a problem for daltonians and weak eyed people. Am I asking for something very difficult for modern software? Obviously not. The only place where I found a solution for a weak eyed accessibility check is Oracle Apex styling editor:

Is it so difficult to at least check 2 colors from the background and foreground for contrast and then to caution unexperienced users about possible problems? Definitely not. This warning should also come with a button:

This would solve most of the problems with bad presentations, grids, tables, prototypes, etc.