Designing with the colorblind in mind will improve your design for everyone

About 4% of the population has some form of color blindness. One in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are color blind and face challenges with a lot of online products like websites, apps, games, and webshops in their daily life.

Thankfully, designing for the colorblind doesn’t have to be difficult. And best of all, designing with the colorblind in mind will also improve your design for everyone.

How does color blindness work?

To see, we need light to hit the retina at the back of our eyes. The retina is made up of photoreceptors: rods and cones. The rods are sensitive to light while the cones pick up color.

Each of the cones is carrying one out of three different photopigments — red, green, and blue — and reacts differently to colored light. Mixing together the information of those three different types of cones makes up our color vision.

When one type of cones malfunctions, the color this cone would normally absorb is altered. This changes your color perception, resulting in what we call color blindness.