...
- Gmail →
- Notice how there are only two areas on the page where they use strong colors as the background: the 'Compose' button and the 'Search' button. And those are really the two most-common actions that a person would be expected to take (aside from reading the list of emails and clicking into one of them). It reminds me of how I would underline the key phrases in my resume to draw the reader's attention to them more quickly.
- Contrast that with this:
, where there are three elements with strong solid-color backgrounds. The selected-template doesn't even correspond to an action that the user would take from this screen, so it seems to go totally against what Gmail did. And I don't think users will be clicking 'Delete' so much that they'll benefit from having such a strong visual guide to that element. I think the 'Save' button makes sense; that seems like a button the users will be clicking a lot from this screen. I think it might also make sense to just have a single 'Add Template' button instead of several of them, and to make that element have a strong solid background.