For web designers and app developers, colors are the important part of a design, and choosing the correct color palette is vital as it determines how usable their app or website is, or how readable any text is.
With design languages to choose from, one of them in Material Design by Google. Knowing the importance of colors, Google is updating Material Design's guidelines to account for color, and introduced a new tool it calls 'Color Tool' to help developers and designers in their work.
Those that opt to use Material Design should know that the design language initially defines what an Android app should look like, at least according to Google.
Emphasizing colors as its main aspect, the design language uses numerous other aspects such as shadows and animations to stand out its flat design.
The guidelines, and the Color Tool, are meant to cover everything that Material Design has from its layouts to animations.
The Color Tools is created for designers and developers to experiment with color combinations in real time. With the tool, they can create and apply color palettes to a sample Material Design environment or via CodePen.
It also allows users to check if any rendered text will appeal to the color combination. Google has taken a standard approach to Material Design, and the tool is meant to help users to use its design according to the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
So the huge part of the tool is accessibility. The Color Tools ensures that developers and designers chose the color combination that will make any text readable to both normal and those that have visual impairments.
Google in updating its Material Design guidelines and introducing the Color Tool is seen as something refreshing. Accessibility is often overlooked by most developers and designers that use Material Design, and this is certainly a progress that makes the design language more mature.