There is always interesting time, when new project is on the board. This time it was a mobile application and me and my coworkers were tossing ideas left and right. So a discussion got a turn to what color scheme should user interface use. Mostly out of fun (and some out of envy), I claimed: “Pink. It should be pink.”

Back then, I thought nothing of it. The statement was meant as a joke and the color was picked based on what would be most inappropriate for this project. Coworkers took it as a joke as well. As a (more and more annoying) joke I threw at them every time, the discussion turned to UI for some reason. But, as things go, the project was ready to be presented to prospective customers. Naturally and understandably, sales pushed for customer company brand color scheme for each demo. Although coworkers did a wonderful job on the project, it still took some fiddly last-minute work to sort the new color scheme and base it on a theme.

At that point, I started figuring out, that as dumb, as my “idea” was, it would be beneficial to the project, if the UI really did use pink color. Reasoning is pretty trivial. When creating a project from scratch, there is usually so much work with basic mechanics, feature implementation and testing, that UI implementation is almost an afterthought. Hence, to solve glitches as quickly as possible, we, developers, tend to use line of least possible resistance and do something stupid like specify color or font inline. I admit, I did it numerous times on other projects. I know it is wrong. Heck, I knew it back then. But I just justified it with the fact that there just wasn’t enough time.

Now, if I made one of those project pink, I am pretty sure, I would do everything in my power to not use cheap corner cutting techniques and to make darn sure that I could swap color scheme faster than you can say cookie with mouth full of, well, cookies. This applies to all other areas as well. Want to make sure that you do not have static text in your project? Use upper case text for everything. Want to write data somewhere? Store it to file on floppy instead.

Thus, the next time you are about to do something, make it pink!