Plyfolio is black and white with one colour, a teal ribbon. People ask why so little colour, and why that one. This is the short answer.
Black and white, like the board
A chess board is two colours and so is a printed score. We wanted the app to feel like the things players already trust: a notation book, a scoresheet, a well-printed chess book. Ink on paper, set clearly, with nothing competing with the moves.
A ribbon marks a place
Good books have a ribbon sewn into the spine, to mark where you stopped. That is the one job our colour does: it marks a place. The last move on the board. The tab you are on. A position you bookmarked. The square a piece has just left.
Because it only ever means "here", you can read it at a glance. If the ribbon is on a square, that is where the last move went. Nothing else on the screen is that colour, so nothing else can be mistaken for it.
What it is never used for
- Buttons. The one main action on a screen is claret, never teal.
- Good and bad moves. There is no green for a good move or red for a blunder. Review marks moments; it does not colour your moves.
- Warnings. A problem is shown in ink, in bold, with the reason beside it. Never in a colour that shouts.
- Large areas. The ribbon stays narrow. It appears in at most two places on any screen.
Why it matters at the board
While you record, the screen has to be calm enough to glance at under a clock and plain enough that an opponent sees a scoresheet. A page of notation in black and white, with one mark for the last move, does both. Colour that meant anything more would be one more thing to read.
Beyond the app
The same rule holds wherever Plyfolio appears. On this website the ribbon marks the section you are in and hangs from the top of the cover on dark pages; it is never a link colour or a button. On a shared image of a game it marks the last move, as it does on the board in the app. On the free scoresheet maker's preview it is not used at all, because a scoresheet that is printed in black ink should look the same on the screen as it does on paper.
Keeping to one rule everywhere is harder than it sounds. Each new screen brings a reason to add a second colour: a status, a category, a chart. So far the answer has been to use ink, weight and space instead, and the screens are better for it. A chart of your rating is drawn in ink with the ribbon on the latest point, because the latest point is the place you are.
Why teal
We tried several colours against the ink and the paper. Teal reads clearly on both, is easy to tell from claret, and does not look like a warning or a success. It is the colour of the ribbon on the app icon, hanging from the top edge of the cover, and it is the same everywhere you see Plyfolio.
Written by Remiam. More from Remiam