The Role of Color Theory in Buckets

The color you use for your website branding can have a dramatic effect on your success. First impressions count, and potential customers can be lost if you have a color scheme that just doesn’t work. And when it comes to brand recognition — getting the color right is kind of a big deal (no pressure). So, how did we come up with our branding color in Buckets?

Well, the role of color theory in web design all boils down to finding the perfect blend for your brand. Although a lot of suggestions have been made regarding the influence of particular colors when it comes to marketing, research has proven that it’s the ‘fit’ that matters most, i.e. how appropriate is the color used with regards to the product/service being sold?

This all ties into the personality of your brand and how you want to be perceived by your audience, which is something that really matters to us at Buckets. When building Buckets, it was important to us to ensure that our productivity app felt accessible to everyone — and not just corporate teams and professionals.

In this post, Buckets co-founder and designer, Eric, will run through exactly how we managed to tread the line between making Buckets a fun place to be and a productivity tool that would appeal to both professionals and nonprofessionals alike.

Reasons For Branding

with Eric Greninger

The early approach to Buckets was to create a system that stepped away from a bland past of lifeless interfaces. To begin embracing the future of how we could engage with our work fondly. We wanted Buckets to be a happy and welcoming environment, one that you didn’t mind looking at for hours on end as you toyed with its features while at the same time portraying a mature and secure nature reflective of the product itself.

Treading the fine line between happy and mature was delicate, but after years of working closely together on other projects outside of Buckets we knew where we wanted to go. We needed something that people could place their faith in and that is essentially what influenced our choice of color. Blue, widely perceived as a trustworthy color, is confident and stable. And it portrays everything we wanted our users to feel as they logged in each day to record simple notes or their most important and sensitive information, knowing it was safe to retrieve at anytime, from anywhere.

We almost all think of a sheet of paper as our starting place as we’re about to craft our thoughts and ideas into something useful, tangible. Naturally white was applied as a secondary color to provide the blank canvas in which the unknown variables in life live. While every clear drop into Buckets summarized these unknowns, they’re continuously bound by the great blue. (That’s my artistic way to analogize Buckets to our Earth as we float through this digital space together.) We found we loved doing little things like knocking out the handle of the Buckets logo, so when it is placed against a white background there is a sense of being drawn into a safe space.

Developing The UI

We’ve learned with many years of practice in the world of digital marketing that leading the eye is arguably the most important factor when choosing colors to apply to the elements nested within our canvas. Grayscale seemed so impersonal and dated. We wanted to explore how to set a mood within our application and started pushing the old standards out of the way in favor of complimentary hues and softer tones. Knowing that our newly adopted blue hue was the primary choice for branding, we carried over the importance of the color we now deemed “Buckets Blue” to noteworthy areas of interest and call to actions throughout. Once the two major elements in the branding and the call to actions had been addressed, we applied tertiary colors that not only blended well but allowed the brand and important elements to stand out in attention without the visual equivalent of shouting.

“Grayscale seemed so impersonal and dated. We wanted to explore how to set a mood within our application and started pushing the old standards out of the way in favor of complimentary hues and softer tones.”

This solidified the majority of the UI color palette and all that was left was to determine how we handled any future needs during exploratory design phases. The essential colors of the rainbow were added to our palette using vivid choices that felt alive, which were in turn used as highlights or attention seekers not only to trigger points but especially organizational cues — such as labels in cards and column colors within the kanban. This is where we could really dive in to provide our users with fun splashes of color to be applied at their whim, allowing them an opportunity to customize their projects and, in a way, express themselves within their personal workspaces.

Evolving Buckets

As Buckets evolved we’ve continued to experiment with how we apply our color palette not only to the UI, but within our marketing efforts as well. The synergy between the two focal points aligning has created some real character within the product recently and we’re now seeing a massive amount of creative solutions being applied universally without losing touch on our want and need to refine, reduce, and polish. By retaining our original choices for the core color palette and sticking to the basics, it has been a solid guide for us through some critical moments. Moments such as the shift to the new UI system currently being rolled out, and the creation of the fun, animated world our Buckethead characters live in.

The recognition internally for the need to keep reducing and refining our visual cues in the UI is not only to continue to polish the product, but really to promote clarity for the user’s attention to important details. Without doing so we would fall into the same redundancies other systems we’re competing with seem to be challenged by. I truly believe the mood you set within your product has a massive impact on its user base and while everyone is currently moving left into these rigid apps, we’re going right to define our own space and give our users a place to customize their home, without the gimmicks.

All it takes is one small defining moment in the design phase to change the entire landscape within our space and Buckets is not afraid to explore these bold ideas with the creative use of colors, even as we go up against some great teams currently dominating in the industry.

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