Sustainable Color Palette
Themes that involve sustainability encompass more and more sectors of the most varied sizes of organizations. In addition to the issue of survival and quality of life for the planet’s inhabitants, consumers are increasingly interested in choosing products from organizations that are aware of their behavior in terms of social, environmental, and governance aspects, the famous ESG.
And, as it could not be otherwise, the IT sector is increasingly becoming the focus of discussions. The area invests in action plans to reduce the carbon footprint, contributing to the reduction of interference in climate change.
Another factor that promotes the sustainability focus on technology is its current expansion speed. Today, numerous industries are adding technology-based solutions and rapidly accelerating their adoption and extension of more digital services and products. In this context, it is necessary that actions are implemented with a focus on achieving the most significant possible scale of results, thus generating a massive and large-scale impact.
Currently, on the Android store, there are more than 3 million apps available for download. The website number is around 1,169,621,187 according to Netcraft’s March 2022 Web Server Survey. Each of these systems offers several screens for users to interact, consume information, record transactions, and exchange messages, among many other features.
The energy consumption of devices with a screen of these electronics, whether smartphones, computers, notebooks, or Smart TVs, among others, is huge. Many of these devices have the functionality of saving energy through a color pattern, with OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) screens that have the ability to turn off a single point (pixel) when the absence of any color is detected, that is the color black.
The decrease in average energy consumption on these devices can be 10% savings, in addition to increasing battery life by up to 47%, in the case of smartphones and notebooks.
Many organizations that develop applications are already offering a “dark” version of their screens to enable this energy and battery saving, which is also combined in offering other direct benefits to users, such as improved experience by highlighting important elements, reduction of visual discomfort for long periods of exposure to artificial light, as well as the removal of eye fatigue by decreasing glare.
Through a study carried out by Jon Doucette, from Jonathan Design, Jon presented a color palette called EMERCY-C composed of six color options, namely:
#822007 Rusty Red
#000000 Black
#b2bbc0 Blue Gray
#19472a Green Forest
#3d414c Cobalt
#ffffff White
This color palette, when used, will generate consumption by only 4% compared to a completely black screen. A small caveat, white color should only be used for small highlights.
This color base can be used to generate the dark version, or easily as the final version of the application or website, thus adding all the benefits to the user experience and implementing a sustainable focus.
At GFT, we are serious about helping our customers to promote the adoption of sustainability as an integral part of the software development process. We created an approach called GreenCoding, fully supported by three pillars that helped organizations to write, develop and deliver solutions focused on sustainable software development, making it possible to reduce energy use and its related CO2 emissions, thus starting a new ‘green border’ in systems coding.
References
» https://www.electrical4u.net/energy-calculation/led-lcd-crt-tv-plasma-tv-power-consumption
» https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/monitor-colors-and-electricity.html
» https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/does-the-dark-mode-on-the-computer-actually-save-electricity.html
