It’s not a digital window to another dimension. It’s a magical canvas made of dancing lights. A flat 2D surface with tiny dimming and brightening parts, and it’s amazing.
You already know the basics of how screens produce colors, so let’s skip to the interesting part.
Our eyes collapse a chaotic spectrum of light into a small set of signals. Screens take advantage of that. They feed our eyes carefully prepared color signals, mostly untouched by the natural light around us.
That’s one reason screens feel slightly unnatural. The colors are too pure. Too isolated. Too intentional.
People with tetrachromacy — and many insects like butterflies — can perceive this strangeness more clearly. Real life contains a richer mess of light than a screen can reproduce.
Screens are limited. Their gamut is finite. The natural cacophony is missing.
But screens can also do something nature rarely does: produce extremely clean and saturated signals at scale. Colors that hit the eye with unusual precision.
Some colors feel faker than others. Another layer of artificiality on the canvas.
So why do we constantly try to make digital things feel natural?
Because we are of nature. Even if technology feels like a strange parallel environment, everything inside it still comes from human imagination, and imagination itself comes from nature.
We are not chasing nature. We are trying to make things feel less awkward between us.
And this matters in UI design.
Understanding what a screen is — and what it is not — helps us choose colors that feel calmer, softer, and more human.
How do you know which colors work?
You feel them.
Most of us grew up with screens, so maybe intense colors no longer bother us much. But natural colors are almost always welcomed.
This is an opinion piece, so here are a few unsolicited preferences: