Color
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Create more accessible, personal color schemes communicating your product's
hierarchy, state, and brand. When designing for wearables, color plays a crucial
role in enhancing legibility, usability, visual appeal, and expression,
especially on smaller screens.
The following principles explain how to use color across themes.
Build from black
Watches are designed with a black background, instead of the tinted background
that phone devices use. While dark themes are meant for low-light environments
and light themes for daylight, watch UIs need to function seamlessly both day
and night. Therefore, color tokens for watches must be specifically tailored.
New color roles
The Material 3 color system retains the structure of three accent colors and two
neutral surface colors, but introduces container colors within the accent roles.
These new roles enable greater expressive potential without disrupting visual
hierarchy, essentially providing surface color variations with increased chroma.
Container roles are particularly useful for highlighting states, such as toggle
buttons, or for providing complementary styling when the primary accent is
already utilized.
Semantic meaning
In watch UIs, colors need to communicate meaning clearly and intuitively. For
example, red indicates errors and green signals success, helping users quickly
understand actions or states without needing extra explanation. This semantic
use of color helps users navigate your UI and take action with confidence.
Color accessibility (contrast compliance)
In watch UIs, colors need to communicate meaning clearly and intuitively. For
example, red indicates errors and green signals success, helping users quickly
understand actions or states without needing extra explanation. This semantic
use of color helps users navigate your UI and take action with confidence.
What's new
There are substantial updates to the visual design system and how we elevate
expression throughout updates to our style foundations, components, and tiles
design libraries.
The Material 3 Expressive color system includes the following features:
- Built-in set of accessible color relationships
- 28+ color roles mapped to Material components
- Built-in dark theme colors for building from black
- Improved disabled color values
- Additional error colors
- Static baseline color with default colors assigned to each color role
- Dynamic color features, including System/Watch face, and image-based color
themes
Resources
To learn more, view the following resources.
Material Design color guidelines
Content and code samples on this page are subject to the licenses described in the Content License. Java and OpenJDK are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-05-20 UTC.
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