As much as I love the colour orange, I tend to be cautious with it in digital design. Yellow too. They both have their uses and can add warmth, approachability and boldness to an interface, but they’re difficult to work with. You have to know their strengths and mitigate for their quirks. Years of getting it wrong has given me a feel for how to get it right.

There are reasons for this, and they’re not just down to taste. Orange and yellow have high luminance, which means they fight harder for attention than other hues. Orange also gives you very little room to move. Most colours tolerate being pushed around: blue can lean lighter, darker, greener or more violet and still read as blue. Orange loses itself faster. It stops being the bold, confident orange you wanted pretty quickly.

Most UI colour systems assume you can derive a range of shades from your primary: for hover states, backgrounds and borders, but orange punishes that assumption. Darken it enough for white text on a button, and it becomes brown. Lighten it too much for a section background, and it becomes beige. If you aren’t careful, you could end up with a palette that communicates something different from what you intended.

Orange can work beautifully as a primary, but it demands vigilance over every derived shade and most colour systems weren’t designed to provide it. This is why I was worried when a good friend of mine, who isn’t a designer, told me he wanted orange as the primary colour on a site he was building himself. He’s a highly intelligent and capable person with strong instincts for his business, but that kind of vigilance isn’t something you have unless you’ve spent years acquiring it.

I failed to convince him. He was just as sure as I was, and we each stayed in our trenches. He completed his site and, as impressive as it is, the loose use of orange has led to exactly the kind of issues I was worried it would. Clumsy-looking buttons are the most visible of them.

I learned that “trust me” is not an argument; it’s a request. And the longer you’ve been doing the work, the more often you might mistakenly reach for it as an arrogant shortcut. The embarrassing part is that during the debate, I was more concerned about the “fact” that I was right than whether or not I was being useful.

When you’re new to a craft, you’re constantly second-guessing yourself, and your reasoning stays on the surface. You can explain every choice because you had to think about every choice. As you get better, the thinking compresses. Decisions that used to take an hour take a second. This is what it means to have expertise, and it’s a real thing, but if you’re not careful, you stop being able to explain yourself, because you’ve stopped needing to explain yourself to yourself.

The problem is that other people still need the explanation. The client doesn’t have your experience or your instincts. If all you can offer in return is a more emphatic version of “no”, you haven’t given them anything to work with. You’ve just asked them to defer to you, which is often exactly what they should do, but when they have an attachment to an idea, patience and kindness go a lot further than “trust me”.

What forced me to actually articulate my reasoning was his refusal to accept the non-articulation. He kept asking, and I kept fumbling, and eventually I had to slow down and excavate the thing I knew in my bones. The reasons were specific. They were about this orange, on this site, built this way, by this person. Once I’d said them out loud, they sounded like reasons rather than stubbornness. He listened. He thought about it. He kept his orange anyway.

I think he made the wrong call. But I don’t think he made it unreasonably, and the difference is what I owed him from the start. He was asking me for my judgment, not my instruction. Judgment you can argue with. Taste you either share, or you don’t.

The lesson, for me, is that the conversation between designer and client only works if both sides are willing to do the work the conversation asks of them. He did his; he made me defend a position I’d been treating as self-evident. I eventually did my part too. The site is fine and performing well in spite of the orange.

We’re still friends. The buttons still look clumsy. I can live with that.