Big palettes look generous in a guideline and fall apart in a product. Five colours, each with one job, go further.
Every identity presentation has the same slide: a dozen beautiful colours, carefully named. Six months later the team is using two of them, plus a blue nobody approved. The palette did not fail because it was ugly. It failed because nobody knew what each colour was for.
Give every colour one job
We work with five roles: background, surface, ink, muted text and accent. If a colour cannot be described by its job, it does not make the cut. This feels restrictive for about a week and then becomes a relief.
Test it on the boring things
Palettes are chosen on posters and lived with on invoices. Before anything is approved, we put it on a data table, a form error, a long article and a dark slide. A colour that only works at full bleed is decoration, not a system.
Contrast is not optional
Check every text pairing against accessibility standards early, while changing it is still cheap. A muted grey that fails on a white card will fail for real people, and it will fail in the place where they are trying to read the price.
Five colours, each with one job, is not minimalism for its own sake. It is the smallest system that still does everything you need.
Written by
Tom de Vries
Partner, Design
Runs identity and type. Believes a good system should still work in black and white at 16px.
