Maarten Idema
Maarten Idema is a Product Design Lead at Xero by day and a code-tinkering maker by night. With a Masters in Type and Media from the Netherlands and a background as a full-stack developer, Maarten sits comfortably at the intersection of design and engineering. He has spent the last 20 years building hybrid teams, lecturing, and building apps. He is most passionate about building tools and visualisations that reveal hidden insights
Modern colour pickers (like those in Chrome and Safari) are visually deceptive and mathematically flawed. They overwhelm users with “choice paralysis” by presenting tens of thousands of indistinguishable “invisible” colours and duplicates that exist to smooth out gradients rather than offer the user distinct choices. This mismatch, along with a fiddly UI, forces users to rely on numerical tweaking (sliders and values) rather than visual manipulation. As a consequence, choosing colours and refining colour choices for style, dark mode alternatives and accessibility is difficult. We tend to stick to the colours that we know and play it safe. The web is constantly being blamed for looking “all the same,” and I believe how we visualise our colour palettes plays a big role in this generalisation. In reality, colour is rich, subtle, visually fun and exciting. In this visually rich lightning talk, I’ll show the flaws in our current tools and demo a live colour wheel alternative that improves the user’s experience by reducing choice and keeping it an entirely visual experience.