If you’re a UI/UX designer and use any kind of laptop or macbook for your daily work, then may you have faced the situation of getting a monitor, cause it’s really hard to design with a small display. Over that, if you’re a windows user, there is a great chance that your display’s color won’t match with your smartphone’s display or any other display. 

And not everyone is good at calibrating their monitors which takes a lot of patience and still shows inaccuracy with budget monitors.

So in this article, we’ll share some of steps we follow in our design team before choosing a display for design related work.

How different monitors matter for different design domains?

Choosing a monitor/display is not an easy task in a market where most of the people go for numbers & features over color accuracy & color gamut. If you’re a hobbyist designer you can have any basic panel to design and showcase your work as it’s not professional. 

But if you’re a professional Graphic Designer, then you can simply do that cause you have to take care of colors while printing also. 

Same story goes with Product Designers where they have to take colors which will be viewed on thousands of screens. 

Similarly for video editors and Color grading artists, they need to have access to the best in class monitors in terms of color production and resolution so that they would be able to handle hi-res footages with 10-12bit colors at least.

Is panel type and color accuracy a top priority for UI/UX Design ?

It depends on 

1. Your Budget

2. Scale of the product that you’re working on

3. Reputation of the brand

But generally Yes, it’s a top priority. Cause there are multiple types of panels involved & it’s the panels which affects colors the most. 

If you’re using a TN color panel, then you need to set your viewing angle to absolute perfect to get an average level of color accuracy. But if your users are using a IPS panel, then viewing angles doesn’t matter them that much & the colors they’ll be seeing will be much different from what you’re seeing from a TN panel. 

And now a days most smartphone screens are either POLED or AMOLED, which are far superior in terms of color & greyscale accuracy than any other display tech.

Types of Panels to choose on your budget

1. TN Panel

These are the budget panels which are advertised as daily use monitors with fastest response time & a bunch of number jargons. But in reality, these type of panels should be avoided as a designer due to their bad viewing angles and colors.

2. VA Panel

These are technically superior than TN Panel, viewing angles and color accuracy is better. But price to performance of this kind of displays is not good.

3. IPS, AH-IPS Panel

These are currently one of the most used panels & also been used as displays in smartphones. These provide far better viewing angles and color accuracy. With this kind of displays, you can find monitors supporting multiple color gamuts such as sRGB, REC.709, Display P3 & more.

But as they’re popular , they also marketed well in the industry with a bunch of features which are unnecessary for designers such as response time, Game mode & more. 

If you’re in budget always choose a monitor with atleast 99% sRGB gamut & if you can stretch your budget then choose a monitor with Display P3 gamut support.

Keep in mind that IPS panels leaks a bit of light with dark background. So choose a panel with minimal light leakage.

4. OLED, QLED, MiniLED & Others

These are much advanced display panels which are pricey but provide the most accurate color information, viewing angles, greyscale balance. Also most smartphone brands currently use OLED displays as standard. So choosing these type of panels will make sure that you’re having a display with great potential.

Color Calibration

(Img source: Asus)

This is where many designers get frustrated even after having most advanced display tech. The problem is, we design screens as per our/product’s use case. The display manufacturer’s usecase is to provide an accurate display to smartphone brands which does have great potential to tune it’s colors. 

But companies which targets general customers, always provide a display tuning or color tuning which will be 5-6% different than it’s competitor. It can be more saturated, can have a bit of cool tint or warmth etc.

So even after using the best monitor available, you can’t expect your designs to produce the same color with every device. It may be 5-6% different, but it’s different.

The workaround to this problem is, even if your display is Pantone or Calman certified, you have to manually set a similar brightness in both your monitor and target display & then find a image with multiple primary color hues at different shades and manually adjust your monitor’s RGB values until it matches with the target display. Also you’ve to do the same with another greyscale image.

Otherwise 5-6% color difference between multiple similar panels is not that much noticeable to general users.

Conclusion

Even though it seems simple, choosing a display for professional design work can be a nightmare if you don’t know how to choose. There are many guides on which monitor to choose, but not how to choose and why to choose a display tech, and if you’ve already chosen a wrong monitor, then also you can calibrate it manually so that it can atleast match some colors with your target device.

We’re also coming up with a detailed guide about how to calibrate a display without using any calibration device very soon. Stay tuned.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Which type of monitor panel is best for UI/UX and graphic designers?

A. For most UI/UX and graphic designers, IPS or AH-IPS panels are the best choice due to their excellent color accuracy, wider viewing angles, and support for professional color gamuts like sRGB and Display P3. Avoid TN panels, and go for 99% sRGB coverage at minimum.

2. Why does my design look different on my smartphone and monitor?

A. This is mostly due to color calibration issues and different display technologies. Smartphones often use OLED or AMOLED panels, which show more vivid colors, while budget monitors may lack accurate color tuning. Matching brightness and manually calibrating RGB levels can reduce this mismatch.

3. Is a color-calibrated monitor necessary for design work?

A. Yes, especially for professional designers working on product UI or brand assets, a color-calibrated monitor ensures consistency across screens. Even with high-end monitors, manual color calibration can help achieve up to 95% accuracy with target devices, improving design consistency.