Several methods and guidelines exist for constructing the most outstanding graphic and UX/UI designs. Designing your UX/UI pieces or pages in grayscale can be helpful. Check out these ten reasons why designing your UX/UI designs in grayscale will increase your design success if you’ve ever wanted to increase your design output or learn new strategies to improve your designs.
- Enhancing accessibility
Giving your users the best experience with the best interfaces you can design is the primary goal of UX/UI—User Experience/User Interface—design. This entails making your design user-friendly and inclusive of everyone who interacts with it.
When you design in grayscale, you can concentrate initially on easily visible elements of the design, such as contrast, size, and spacing. Grayscale tones make contrast easy to detect. When creating in color, contrast is frequently forgotten, especially if you don’t have any visual limitations that would make it difficult to notice a lack of contrast.
Following the WCAG accessibility criteria, create high-contrast grayscale first and then in color. You can also utilize tools to simulate color blindness to test how your design seems to others. This will guarantee that more people can access your UX/UI designs.
- Emphasizes layout and structure
As a designer, function is more important to you than form. Designers make things appear good, but before they can be beautiful, they must also work well. By designing in grayscale, you may avoid being sidetracked by color and concentrate on the organization and structure of your design.
Layout and structure, specifically, are crucial in UX/UI design. You’re creating the user experience for your app or website. The page or app’s system should be clear, and the layout must make sense. As soon as the remainder is in place, color may come.
- Starting Point for Neutral Collaboration
If you’re on a design team, starting by designing in grayscale enables everyone to create from a neutral position. Teams of creative individuals focus too much on unimportant details like color when there are more crucial parts of UX/UI design.
Grayscale allows you to start neutrally and concentrate your cooperation efforts on the most important things. You don’t need to consider colors and decorations while designing interface components like layouts, typography, and interface elements.
Consider using colors to enhance the structural design if the cooperation approves of the UX/UI layout design. Your team would have established a smooth working relationship, making the color selections less difficult.
- Quicker Iterations
Revisions are significantly quicker when your design’s foundation is complete and you understand how it works. Iterations can be made, shared, and decided upon more quickly when you aren’t concentrating on color, especially when dealing directly with clients.
Clients frequently place color above design purposes. By eliminating color from the iteration possibilities, you, the client, and the design team can concentrate more quickly on what needs to change.
Moving or resizing items is quicker when everything is grayscale. You won’t have to keep changing the colors of items to fit or decide where to arrange them based on complementary or discordant colors. Indeed, this expedites the design process.
- Simpler to Color
The grayscale design makes it much simpler to add color. Color selection is the last step of the process if everything has been predesigned and approved.
When you design in grayscale, you cannot only use black. Grayscale design allows you to incorporate contrast differences into your designs while they are still in the design phase.
When visual contrast disparities exist, assigning colors to items is significantly simpler and quicker, especially when adhering to color contrast accessibility rules. When using a constrained color scheme, you should assign each hue to a contrast value. You input each contrast value color into your grayscale design at that point.
- Eliminates Visual Clutter
You may concentrate on the design components when you design in grayscale. Too much color can add clutter to your design throughout the design process and the result.
Making designs without color might help you avoid over-designing with color or other components by producing clean, well-organized designs. Your UX/UI design will be clutter-free and instead highlight your svelte style.
- Color Is Not the Most Vital Aspect
Color frequently contributes to establishing brand style or guidelines and often becomes a distinguishing feature of your project, brand, or company—but color isn’t the most crucial part of a UX/UI design. If you’ve ever used your iPhone in grayscale mode, you’ll be aware of this.
A design is successful if it can still be used in grayscale without any problems. Your design’s color scheme is irrelevant because the function is unaffected.
Your UX/UI designs will perform more effectively if you incorporate texture and shape rather than just color. There are composition guidelines for design that are very comparable to the composition rules for photography.
Ensure your UX/UI design works properly, is accessible to everyone, and looks beautiful. Use color to reflect your branding after that.
- Get constructive feedback more often
Although it was only briefly mentioned before, your UX/UI design will get more helpful input now that color is no longer a source of distraction. Whether you’re sharing your project with a client who has yet to gain design experience or absorbing criticism from your design team of qualified designers, this holds.
Humans naturally see color and relate it to characteristics such as unfavorable or favorable connotations, gender expectations, or other correlations. Your constructive feedback won’t be distracted by color associations when grayscale designs are presented because they allow you to concentrate solely on the design.
- Save money and time
Time is money in the world of business. Designing in grayscale can save you time and, ultimately, money.
It takes time to add color when designing from scratch. Then, without a doubt, rather than concentrating on designing, you would spend time altering or editing colors throughout the creative process. This once more delays the design process.
It is much simpler—and quicker—to add color to already-existing design elements than to try to think of colors for pieces that do not yet exist. Adding color after your design lets you know which features and layouts you employ.
- You Can Change UX/UI Colors
Applications and UX/UI designs let many users control their own color. Although color is the final stage of your design implementation and your interface design is the main focus, remember that many people change the colors of their device apps and websites.
Although you should plan for each option in your approach, light and dark modes will affect the colors you can use. For more information, see our guidelines for creating a dark-mode UI.
Despite your color preferences at the time, numerous amusing quirks enable people to modify design colors to anything they like. It’s better that your design functions in grayscale or any color rather than simply one colorway since these odd tools, like the ability of iPhone users to alter the text color on iOS devices or the ability of text bubbles on iPhones to change color, might make all of your efforts to design for colors useless.
Grayscale Design Will Improve Your UX/UI Designs
Even while it may seem strange to start working in grayscale after spending your entire life designing in color, it’s an excellent habit to get into. Grayscale design will highlight crucial design components, including shapes, textures, and accessibility. It will give your design greater depth instead of emphasizing a feature like color, which consumers can alter quickly.
