Palette, Purpose, Prototype: The Three Ps of Color Design and How Designers Navigate Them

This paper contributes to understanding of a fundamental process in design: choosing colors. While much has been written on color theory and about general design processes, understanding of designers’ actual color-design practice and experiences remains patchy. To address this gap, this paper presents qualitative findings from an interview-based study with 12 designers and, on their basis, a conceptual framework of three interlinked color design spaces: purpose, palette, and prototype. Respectively, these represent a meaning the colors should deliver, a proposed set of colors fitting this purpose, and a possible allocation of these colors to a candidate design. Through a detailed report on how designers iteratively navigate these spaces, the findings offer a rich account of color-design practice and point to possible design benefits from computational toolsthat integrate considerations of all three.