7 Color Pattern Trends in Mobile App Design

You must have heard the words like trends of color schemes/patterns in mobile app development and designing because mobile phones are the best and most convenient way to connect yourself to the digital world. 

The mobile app market is extremely huge, and it is kept on increasing. 

Mobile apps are projected to generate the U.S. $189 billion of revenue rate by 2020.

The number of downloads for mobile apps is expected to reach $258.2 billion in 2022 from $178.1 billion yearly in 2017. 

These numbers are huge enough to leave you open-mouthed. 

So, what are the factors to determine the success of your app? For more details on web app development, contact Syncrasy Tech a global IT solutions company.

Functionality has its own value, but the design is no less than that. There are many things to consider when it comes to great mobile app design.

The following are 7 mobile app color schemes/patterns to follow in 2020:

1. Focused Color Palette With Minimal Color Usage

In this color scheme, colors are not overused. Uncountable mobile apps utilize minimal colors.

Moreover, more and more white space is provided. Such design should visibly differentiate between active and linked elements.

Clean and concise app color schemes are able to improve the user experience very well. It’s all because of the natural urge of our brain to see soothing colors on a surface glaring.

On the contrary, the use of too many colors can negatively spoil the user experience. 

It must be noted that minimal color usage doesn’t mean a monochrome design. It indicates the needed colors to a limited extent. 

Even, when a designer picks a minimal color scheme, they can differentiate the app excellently.

For doing so, the designer uses many tones, tints, and shades in a single color. A designer can also adjust the brightness and saturation.

Use of different brightness in a single color lays pressure on the eyes less than the use of too many contrasting colors.

It’s wise for a designer to test their color scheme for all platform types like Android, iOS, and so on. Moreover, they must test their color scheme for different popular devices.

If the color scheme is compatible with the device, the minimal color use can work better.

2. Use of High-Contrast Colors in UI

This trend attained popularity with iOS 7. The purpose is the introduction of very bright colors in the UI. Some examples are bright green, bright pink, and red. It provides a striking contrast.

A bright color is mostly used for significant contents or ‘CTA’ or Call to Action buttons.

The benefit of this mobile app color scheme is that; it allows users to clearly see the CTA button or other important content. The color appears so attractive that user’s attention shifts to seeing that content or taking that action.

This approach is worth-using if your app has such requiring actions.

Take an example of a music app, many famous music apps have the ‘Play’ button shown in a strikingly bright color.

The contrast provided against the background makes it easily visible to users on the action that is important. It is due to the fact that high-contrasting colors make readability and legibility much better.

High-contrast color schemes bank on the natural categorization of colors into weak and strong. For instance, white is a weak color, on the contrary orange is a strong color.

The human brain gives reaction to strong colors more intensely. A content shown in bright color remains in the memory of human beings for a long time.

If an app grabs the attention this way, it means that the app will have higher user retention.

Using the same bright color is wise for one CTA button across all screens, for example, ‘Buy’.

It will conveniently help a user automatically remember that CTA button, which will also help them in finding easily on the other screens as well.

3. Less Noticeable Colored Shadows

Designers spend a great deal of effort to analyze the market and form new ideas. It helps in providing differentiated designs. And, subtle colored shadows in mobile UI design is a fine example.

Usually, shadows are monochrome. This is how we have always seen them. While there are mobile UI design use cases where an icon plays a big role. Now, by their very nature, you can only provide limited icons.

You must be curious to know why so. It’s because when you use icons in the mobile UI design, it seems that you are trying to save space by omitting texts. 

It makes you depend on users to a large extent. Some questions come up.

Do users intuitively recognize an icon?

Is that icon recognized universally? You are fine then.

While if your icons are not universally-recognized or understandable, everything will change. Your users won’t be able to know what to do from the icon.

Moreover, you haven’t given any text, which describes the function either. The fact is that you must not use such little-known icons.

It leaves a limited choice of icons for you to play with, and the question arises “how will you differentiate your design." Subtle colored shadows lay a huge effect here.

Within the icon, use of bright and muted colors can help you create subtle shadows. It will provide an influential 3D effect to your icons. It appears as a clear differentiation from the rival.

However, you must keep in mind that the use of subtle colored shadows work when there is a muted background for the icon. 

Otherwise, your users will not be able to focus on the icon due to the bright background, which will also need their attention.

Therefore, you must use this mobile app color scheme for your icons only when having the background of the icon in a weak color.

4. Bright Color Iconography

There are some apps which require many icons on one screen. Each icon shows elements with potentially equal importance. This is common for apps that provide multiple sub-functionalities.

In this situation, you have a challenging task of showing the significance of each sub-functionality at the same time.

If only one icon is highlighted, then it could happen that users won’t remember the sub-functionalities. It can limit the influential usage of your app users will more often easily find one functionality and pay heed to it.

It is a must for you to indicate the importance of all sub-functionaries in your mobile app development and design patterns. To do this, you need to make each icon or element striking. Bright colored iconography copes with this use issue. 

Here, for each element or icon, you use bold and bright colors. Users will notice the attention-grabbing appearance of each element.

The purpose of using bright colors is to make sure that each element and icon make its own place in their memory. They don’t need to look around for sub-functionalities again when returning to the app.

Furthermore, you must remember that you are using many bright colors for elements and icons, you should have a background with weak colors like white. Otherwise, the screen may annoy users’ eyes.

4. Use of Pastel, Muted Colors

The mobile UI design is not a matter in which one size is suitable for all. There are numerous reasons for this, and one of them is that a mobile app is a ‘System of Engagement’ or (SoE).

It’s not necessary that it is a transaction system, known as ‘Systems of Record’ or (SoR). There are fixed users for SoR, for example, a corporate internal web app has its functional users.

Such users don’t have a choice. Whether the UI is interesting or not, users have to use it. However, in SoEs, a user has many choices. If they find any UI boring, they will not return to the app.

Now, you must keep in mind that users are not a monolithic entity. They are many, and every one of them has unique needs. The mobile app ecosystem isn’t a monolithic entity too due to numerous use cases.

An app must appeal according to its use case.

For example, a live-streaming music app signifies fast speed action. While a personal finance app needs calm and cool analysis.

Each app has a different appeal. The UI must be according to the characteristics of the app for the creation of that appeal.

There is a large number of apps for which bold colors are unsuitable. low/medium saturation, soft or subdued shade and comfortable colors are more suitable. Pastel colors are being proven ideal for such apps.

5. Limit Your Choice to White, Black, and Grey Color

This mobile app color scheme can be considered as a subset of the minimal color usage trend. This is for those apps, in which the screen displays limited content. There could also be limited CTA buttons.

Furthermore, the use case of the app needs to be that the users’ attention will be mostly limited to the content.

Such use case makes many other trends useless because colorful CTA buttons or elements are absent. It is known that the user will mostly read the content, designs that look like the old model diaries is sensible.

The combination of black texts and white background and CTA button can be fine for such apps.

6. The Trend of High-Contrast, Complimentary Gradients

It is a slightly different form of the high-contrast color trend. The thing that is different here is the use of a different type of gradient.

Generally, gradients of the same color. However, the thing that is different here is the use of high-contrast color in the gradient.

An app having a high concentration of imagery in the content often needs to make sections of the content differently. The main part is where the user entered the content, for example, a social media app.

It may happen that users could browse another users’ page, and then click for more details.

The subsequent page show images related to the user, whereas, the main part can use a gradient of high-contrast complementary colors, the other sections display images.

The user is anchored to the profile because of the gradient.

7. Colorful Illustration

An app that needs its users to understand and use a set of work steps requires illustrations. A large number of mobile app developers will now use bold colors and subtle colored shadows within these illustrations.

If you want to use this app color scheme, you must remember to utilize weak colors for the background.

In a view, this method is a slightly different form of the famous illustration-based design method having a wide use even away from mobile UI design.

In this blog post, we had a detailed discussion over 7 mobile app color schemes and the importance of mobile apps in this digital era is also supported with appropriate stats.