The importance of colors

Believe it or not, colors can utterly sink an HMI. Colors are one of the most important aspects of an HMI in my opinion. Choosing the wrong colors for your HMI will literally hurt your operator’s eyes. A general, but not normally followed, rule is that you want to use dark, pastel colors for your HMI. This will reduce the contrast of the HMI screen and make it easier to operate. Generally, you want to avoid bright colors. Normally, HMI developers will opt for colors such as black or gray for backgrounds and different shades of gray for control colors. To start the color discussion, let’s look at backgrounds.

Backgrounds

In terms of backgrounds, I like to stick with shades of gray, depending on what I’m doing or if specified otherwise. However, some organizations I have worked for have primarily used black or shades of dark blue backgrounds and have used them to great success.

Black backgrounds are excellent; however, they do require...