I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
On the note of colors, make a point to pay attention to the contrast ratios. There's no point in having an amazing vibrant color palette if nobody can read anything or differentiate UI controls. This should factor into design beyond just choosing colors in the first place. Some places should be high contrast (for example, text), but others should actually be lower contrast (see for example the color difference between the card elements and the background here on DEV in the default or night themes, high contrast there would actually be rather distracting).
Also, just because a color palette is popular doesn't mean it's a good one. For example, Bootstrap 4's default color scheme looks nice, but it's actually got pretty bad contrast in a number of cases, and borders on unusable for people who are colorblind.
On the note of colors, make a point to pay attention to the contrast ratios. There's no point in having an amazing vibrant color palette if nobody can read anything or differentiate UI controls. This should factor into design beyond just choosing colors in the first place. Some places should be high contrast (for example, text), but others should actually be lower contrast (see for example the color difference between the card elements and the background here on DEV in the default or night themes, high contrast there would actually be rather distracting).
Also, just because a color palette is popular doesn't mean it's a good one. For example, Bootstrap 4's default color scheme looks nice, but it's actually got pretty bad contrast in a number of cases, and borders on unusable for people who are colorblind.
Absolutely - that's a great point. There are plenty of tools out there to test colour contrast as well. No more excuses white on pale grey!