I’m not really a designer - more of a web developer - so this might be a dumb question, but here goes.
I have the following logo that I want to build a material design color palette around:
I read that material design has primary/secondary with light and dark variants. Would it make sense to take hues and then use the more / less saturated variants, directly as they are in the logo? For example, the two blues and then maybe the pink and purple? Or would it be better to not do that and choose colors that aren’t even in the logo?
How would you go about choosing a color scheme for the rest of this landing page? (I don’t really even have much of a landing page to share, but I started thinking about this and now I think I’m over-thinking it) Thoughts?
Are you referring to Google’s Material Design system? If so, why are you using it? Is this something for Google? In my opinion, this and other visual design systems are for developers and engineers who need every design decision spelled out in a book.
Unless I was working on a project for a company with strict style guidelines, I’d throw away the rules and rely on my design experience to guide me.
I only have a passing familiarity with Google’s visual design system, so I can’t tell you what they would do. However, if a company’s visual style rules didn’t bind me, I would probably use the colors in the logo for secondary and tertiary use.
However, the way I would use them would depend on the appropriate personality I felt was best to impart. For example, if the appropriate look is more playful, I might make liberal use of the existing and deeply saturated logo hues. If a more conservative look was needed, I might take shades of the logo colors and use them more conservatively. Without being unnecessarily bound by a so-called visual design style system (or style guidelines), I would do whatever was best for the job at hand. There are probably dozens of different solutions that would work well.
I realize I haven’t answered your question as you intended. You’re a web developer and I’m a professional designer, which creates a bit of an awkward gap between how we might approach UI/UX problems.
I learned a lot from your post. I’ll play around with some of the tips you mentioned, but it also seems like it’s maybe, not surprisingly I guess, a bit of an art that is hard to lay out an exact repeatable process for every scenario. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
