Yellow block over blossoms

The Colour Yellow in Design and Life

The downsides of using the colour yellow in design.

Yellow is a primary colour that has a lot of drawbacks when using it for design, fashion, and any other place. Yellow is hard to see when designed poorly and hard to care for with products. This is more of a commentary about the use of yellow in design and life.

This colour needs some care in comparison to some other colours to stands out on most designs and prints. This depends on the yellow being used; but for this argument, this is about yellow unmixed with blues and reds. It’s a very light colour that can be difficult to use because of contrast. Imagine a newspaper or a novel, the background is white and the foreground is black. You see the text because the contrast between the two colours is strong. Yellow is sometimes paired with colours that are not that visible, like white, or very light soft colours that blend in with yellow seamlessly. I have seen yellow has a foreground text colour against white paper. This makes the message written in yellow invisible because the contrast is not strong enough. Using yellow is possible when placed with very dark colours for high contrast like Navy blue or black.

There are times when using these colours are beneficial. For people who have colour blindness, can [sometimes] see these colours, unlike reds or greens. Yellow can be used for designing for accessibility. When designing for people with colour blindness regardless of the colour attention to contrast and use can be the difference between usability or confusion. Some colour blind people could confuse yellow with purple or green or red or blue. Therefore, use colours cautiously for emphasis when designing for colour-blind people.

Yellow can be used for design as a highlight colour that tells the user special or important information like cautions.

In a different note about the colour yellow.

When you need to do the laundry, yellow picks up colour like a colour magnet. It’s not like white when you can still bleach the colour (to a degree) when colours bleed. And it’s not like red or orange clothes that can be re-dyed when colours fade. Yellow is a very delicate colour that fades easily. Separating yellow clothes in two different piles to be washed with the white clothes can keep the colour to last longer. When yellow clothes bleach, fade or have a large patch of colour it’s harder to fix when the colours are so delicate.

Images by Under The Moonlight
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