--- title: "How to choose the right colors for your mobile app" description: "Colors set the tone of an app. They make a brand recognizable, create a mood and guide the eye to what matters. Let's dive into how to choose the right colors" canonical_url: "https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-colors-for-your-mobile-app-a1167/" lang: en date: 2022-05-23 last_updated: 2026-10-09 --- # How to choose the right colors for your mobile app ![](https://blog.goodbarber.com/_public/profile/27/27d5454df9b59bdd3445adaa050cf2316d143af4-default.jpg) [Marie Pireddu](https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/author/marie-pireddu/)Employee at GoodBarber May 23, 2022 · Updated Oct 9, 2026 · 6 min read ![](https://cmsphoto.ww-cdn.com/superstatic/41269/art/grande/64466167-46208116.jpg?v=1652959350.0964756) Colors set the tone of an app. They make a brand recognizable, create a mood and guide the eye to what matters. Let's dive into how to choose the right colors for your mobile app, and which tools can help. ## Why colors matter This choice is never random. Companies are well aware of the importance of color when it comes to influencing consumer behavior. Each color carries its own associations. For example, red evokes strong emotions like love, passion, and anger. In a marketing context, red is often used for special offers or discounts. People now associate this meaning, so it’s a good idea to use red if you want to draw attention to an offer you are making. Blue and green are relaxing and soothing colors. They convey feelings of trust and commitment. Black and grey are elegant colors. Black is also used to give a modern and trendy feel. Yellow is a catchy and cheerful color, but it should only be used in small amounts to highlight, otherwise it is perceived as irritating. Color is a very useful tool to create a brand identity and trigger specific emotions in users. ## How to choose the colors of your app ![Color Wheel infographic](https://cmsphoto.ww-cdn.com/superstatic/41269/art/grande/64466167-46224601.jpg?v=1652279663.433318) *Color Wheel infographic* **First, you need to know your brand and what you want it to be associated with**. What is the mood or feeling you want to express? How do you want people to feel about using your app? Do you want your brand and app to feel accessible, calm, bold, sophisticated, polished, quirky, or elegant? Once you've defined this, look at **which color evokes this emotion.** Colors can be divided into two main categories: warm and cool. Warm colors tend to be associated with energy, while cool colors are linked with calmness and security. For example, - **Red** is often associated with bold or intense experiences - **Yellow** is cheerful, joyful, optimistic - **Blue** is one of the most prominent colors in nature. Associated with water and air, it’s tied to calmness and tranquility. It's also often used to symbolize stability and trust. - **Green** symbolizes abundance, growth, and health, and has become popularly associated with peace, and environmental consciousness. - **Orange** represents cheerfulness, confidence, and fun. - **Purple** represents power, wealth, and royalty. - **White** evokes light, purity, or cleanliness. It’s associated with simplicity and modernity in design. - **Black** is associated with power, elegance, and sophistication. Your next step is to **create your color scheme**. A lot of successful brands have only one or two brand colors, so don’t be afraid to keep it simple and stick with that core brand color. A color scheme is simply the way colors are combined together. - You can choose one base color and then different tones of that one color. You can use a **color wheel** to help you choose different hues of that same color, varying the saturation and tone of the base color to pick out lighter and darker hues. This is called the **Monochromatic color scheme.** It gives a more uniform look and feel to your app. - Next is the **Triadic color scheme**. There, you'll use three colors, equally spaced on the color wheel. This too will create a harmonious look, but without the ombré effect of the monochromatic scheme. - A **complementary color scheme** is composed by using two colors opposite each other on the color wheel. It is the most contrasting of all color schemes, and the one that attracts the most attention. For example, red and green, blue and orange. - Analogous colors are a group of three colors next to each other on a color wheel, such as violet, red-violet, and red. When these colors are grouped we call it an **analogous color scheme**. The color in the center of this group of three is sometimes called the mother color since the other two colors contain that center color. Analogous color schemes create a visually pleasing and calming display. Whatever scheme you choose, check that your text stays readable on its background. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) call for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. **Misconceptions to avoid** **Consumers' differences:** Colors don't have the same meaning everywhere. For example in the Western world, white symbolizes purity and peace, and it is generally worn at weddings. But in China, white is traditionally the color of mourning, worn at funerals. Keep this in mind when planning your color scheme, since your app will reach users all around the world. **The sector in which your business operates.** Every sector has its own color codes. The most important thing is to consider the best color for you in your specific context rather than think about the general impact of color. ## 5 free tools to help you find your colors You're now ready to pick your mobile app colors. These free tools will help you put everything you learned in this article to good use, so that you can pick the best color scheme and palette for your app. **[Adobe Color](https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel),** Adobe's online tool built around the color wheel. Choose a base color and a harmony (monochromatic, complementary, analogous, triadic…), and the tool builds the palette for you. It can also extract a palette from an image, measure the contrast between two colors, and simulate how your palette looks to people with color blindness. [**My Color.Space**](https://mycolor.space/) is a great free resource to generate color palettes and color gradients. You start with a color of your choice. Enter the HEX code and ColorSpace generates several palettes matching your color. If you don't know the HEX code, there are plenty of free tools online that will give you the code from a photo you upload. **[Coolors](https://coolors.co/)** generates palettes in one click and also lets you browse ready-made ones. Its Image Picker builds a palette from the photo of your choice. The essentials are free; a paid Pro version exists. **[Color Viewfinder](https://apps.apple.com/app/color-viewfinder-palette/id519551982)** is a convenient app when you need to quickly create color palettes. This free iOS app (with in-app purchases) automatically generates a color palette based on a photo on your device and requires little editing and changing. Color results can be added or removed from the generated palette, and the final selection of colors displays next to the original photo and their HEX color codes. **[WebAIM's Contrast Checker](https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/)** makes sure your text stays readable. Enter your text color and your background color, and it calculates their contrast and tells you whether the pair meets accessibility guidelines (WCAG). A good habit before you finalize your palette. You're now ready to pick your color scheme for your mobile app. You have all the tips and tools you need to get started. If this still seems a little too much, don't worry. In your GoodBarber back office, the Colors page (My App › App style › Colors) offers a catalog of color themes created by our designers. Find the one that best fits your brand, select it and it will automatically apply to all the sections of your app! Prefer a custom palette? On the same page, the Magic palette, an AI trained by GoodBarber for app colors, builds one in one click, with contrast and readability in mind. Regenerate it until you find the right one, then save it. ![](https://blog.goodbarber.com/_public/profile/27/27d5454df9b59bdd3445adaa050cf2316d143af4-default.jpg) About the author Marie Pireddu Employee at GoodBarber [More from Marie](https://www.goodbarber.com/blog/author/marie-pireddu/)