How different Design Systems talk about color
I was researching for design-systems/styleguides/companies that define how they actually use color. As I found this to be value information I’d just like to share the results of my 25min (pomodoro yey) research with you here.
So what I basically did is take screenshots of the things I found interesting and write down where it came from if you want to go back there.
Material Design
https://www.google.com/design/spec/style/color.html
Yelp
http://www.yelp.com/styleguide#color
Frontify
https://brand.frontify.com/d/qAiubNBytHKf/style-guide#/style-guide/colors
Atlassian
https://design.atlassian.com/product/foundations/colors/
Barricade
https://styleguide.barricade.io/styles.html#colors
Channel 4
http://www.channel4.com/about_c4/styleguide/downloads/C4StyleGuide1.1.pdf
Futurelearn
I used http://styleguides.io/examples.html as a resource for styleguide
Post-research thoughts:
The biggest learning for me after the research is: it’s about the precision of the documentation. Some needed a very precise explanation and some didn’t even bother to talk about how they use text color on background.
I will now take a look at what we struggle the most with in our product and start to think about how we can fix the biggest struggles with small amount of documentation instead of writing a complete color-usage-guidelines.pdf of 14pages.
Why am I even sharing this?
Maybe™ this inspires someone to think about this again or on a detailed level or maybe someone wanted to always do this kind of research and now doesn’t have to anymore. Also it’s pretty exciting for me if sharing research results is something people would like to see or if it’s just polluting the internet. So please let me know what you think about this in the comments and if you have some great links for color usage definitions I’d be superhappy if you comment them and I’ll probably add it to the list.
Thanks for your reading ❤
