Interview · 7 min read
Building in monochrome
A conversation with a design director about why removing colour forced her team to finally fix the hierarchy.
We started the conversation with a constraint she imposed on her team for a full quarter: no colour in any new work. No brand blue, no accent, no gradient. Black, white, and the space between them.
The first two weeks were miserable, she says. Colour had been doing the job that structure should have been doing, signalling importance, separating sections, hiding the fact that three things on the page all claimed to be primary.
By week six the team had rebuilt the type scale, cut the number of components by a third, and shipped a homepage that converted better than the version it replaced. The colour came back eventually, but only in places that had earned it.
The lesson she offers is blunt: if the work does not hold up in black and white, colour is not a design decision. It is an anaesthetic.