How do you know if you are interacting with a person or a model? How can you distinguish between information returned via a prompt request from information that was manually entered?

Color has emerged as a helpful signal to help users identify AI products and features. There is by no means a set color scheme, and this pattern is likely to evolve more as high-performing products start to break free of the pack and differentiate. Where there is a degree of uniformity, two colors stand out: purple and green.

Purple is the more dominant of the two. It is present in a majority of products boasting AI features, which could be the result of many patterns converging at once: 

• Trends in modern web design driven by the aesthetic style popularized by Linear, which heavily features the color purple
• Early uses in design-centered AI tools like Diagram's Magician plugin for Figma
• The need for a color that wasn't commonly used elsewhere in interfaces but still felt familiar (purple being a close cousin to the ubiquitous blue)

The other color, green, probably has more predictable roots since it is the dominant brand color of ChatGPT, the largest player in the space. Green and purple are also complementary to each other on the color wheel, so the pairing shouldn't be surprising.

Should you use purple or green, or something else? That's up in the air, and up to you.

Some companies are opting to rely on iconography over color, extending their brand color to AI applications instead. ReWord is an example of a company marching to the beat of their own drum. Grammarly benefits from their existing brand color, green, being in the popular palette. However unlike almost anyone else in their space, they rely on colorful iconography instead of the more common flat sparkles patterns, making the departure from the purple/green color palette feel striking.

Perhaps this is because these two companies are in a highly commodified space, where creative brand and aesthetics styles are necessary to stand apart. We will need to watch patterns emerge in other categories before we can draw a definitive conclusion.

It’s likely we’ll continue to see brands play around with balancing consistency and their own color schemes. Purple is probably not going away, but it may fade in the background. Brands whose entire product revolve around AI, or in competitive spaces might be the first to develop their own aesthetic.

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Lesser patterns

There are some smaller trends emerging related to color. Gradients are used in many sites, though that may have as much to do with an interest in appearing modern as anything else (RIP Flat Design, and good riddance).

Google is one player to watch, for obvious reasons due to its size but they also are playing with color in ways that aren’t echoed by other sites as far as I can tell. In their AI-generated search results, conversations alternate between different hues of pastel for each response in the search window. This has the combined benefit of separating conversations from each other while still contrasting with the rest of the search results page.