Thinking about color

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment - Claude Monet

Over the last two years we’ve tried to improve our usage of color at Cloudflare. There were a number of forcing functions that made this work a priority. As a small team of designers and engineers we had inherited a bunch of design work that was a mix of values built by multiple teams. As a result it was difficult and unnecessarily time consuming to add new colors when building new components.

We also wanted to improve our accessibility. While we were doing pretty well, we had room for improvement, largely around how we used green. As our UI is increasingly centered around visualizations of large data sets we wanted to push the boundaries of making our analytics as visually accessible as possible.

Cloudflare had also undergone a rebrand around 2016. While our marketing site had rolled out an updated set of visuals, our product ui as well as a number of existing web properties were still using various versions of our old palette.

Our product palette wasn’t well balanced by itself. Many colors had been chosen one or two Continue reading