A unified palette system for a coherent experience

But Material Design for Wearables does more than whining about whites and greys: it offers a complete system to build a dark palette made up of five different shades of any original Material 500 color (or any app primary color, for that matters); each shade has been labeled and is intended to be applied to a certain family of UI components — and the overall palette is supposed to cover most of any apps needs.

The same app-specific palette is used by the OS when serving notifications to the main stream: the background color of the card is applied by Android Wear itself — hands off, developers! — and it is simply the darkest shade of the palette derived from the app’s primary color. This way, color is used to create a coherent experience through the whole system.

Anatomy of a dark Material palette: meet the fabulous five

As I mentioned earlier, a palette built for a Material wearable apps derives directly from an original Material 500 color chosen as the app primary color and contains five of its shades — the primary color is not consistently used as part of the palette itself. Each shade is named after the UI region that’s designed to fill: color is then even more informative on Wear, because it defines not only some key UI components but every UI region’s function.

Let’s meet these five, from the darkest to the brightest: