Hello again, Kathryn here, the other 20% of MKDB Studio. 

So, colour (I'm British, I spell colour with a u) is not something I understood much of before this project. Despite having studied art and design and holding a degree in the subject, colour theory really wasn't covered much in my education. Luckily there are some really good resources for understanding colour theory around the internet and I wasn't afraid to use them when coming up with the colour palette for Signals. 

It all started with Teal

We had one colour in mind for this project and that was this vibrant teal that the two of us felt was a good starting point.

It worked well with both white and black and gave us the modern spacey vibes we felt would suit the game. 

It was from here that I had to research more about colour theory in order to expand the colour palette. Youtube has some excellent videos on the subject and I utilised the method laid out in this video :

I didn’t follow it perfectly but it certainly opened up our options.  However it was missing a complimentary colour to the teal, so the simplest way I found to remedy that was to invert the palette in Photoshop. 

We needed the complimentary colour for calls to action within the game so it would stand out without clashing. 

With all these colours at our disposal, I pulled it down to 3 colours and a dark grey.  

I used these as the main colours in the UI design, until one morning, Michel stopped all work done to date and did a complete 180 degree turn on the look and feel of the game. 

Fortunately because our base colour palettes were large enough, pivoting to a new colour palette was simple. The new game look and feel required more pastel tones and moving from a base tone of black to a base tone of white. So I utilised the same colours but taken from the paler strip at the top and bottom of the respective palettes. 

The New Colour Palette

So we ended up with a much softer palette and it looks nothing like what you would expect from a space game, however it works. I will go into more detail of the shift in design next time when I talk about my process designing the UI for Signals. Until then, enjoy watching Michel fix the bugs I report live on Twitch now (https://www.twitch.tv/mkdbstudio).