Adding colour to a desk is easy. Adding colour to a desk without it turning into a jumble sale is the harder bit, and it's where most setups fall down.
The good news is that the difference between a colourful desk and a messy one is mostly a few rules rather than better taste or a bigger budget. Here they are.
Why do colourful desk setups end up looking messy?
Almost always because there are too many different colours, each appearing only once.
One pink thing, one green thing, one yellow thing and one blue thing don't read as colourful. They read as random. Your eye has nothing to follow, so it bounces around the desk and the whole thing feels unsettled.
The other three culprits, in order of how much difference they make:
- Cables. Nothing undoes a nice desk faster than four black wires going in different directions.
- Small items loose on the surface. Ten little things scattered about look like clutter. The same ten in a pot look like a setup.
- No empty space. A desk with nowhere for your eye to rest always feels busy, no matter what's on it.
Start by picking three colours
Choose three, and make sure each one appears at least twice.
That repetition is the whole trick. It's what makes a room look designed rather than accumulated, and it works exactly the same on a desk. If your mouse mat is pink and your pen pot is pink, the pink now looks deliberate. If the only pink thing is a single sticky note, it looks like it wandered in.
A workable formula:
- One main colour that covers the biggest area
- One supporting colour that appears a few times in medium-sized things
- One accent that shows up in small doses, and is allowed to be loud
Wood, white and black don't count towards your three. They're the background your desk already came with.
Add colour in big blocks, not small bits
One large colourful thing beats ten small colourful things, every time.
This is the single most useful rule on this page. Big flat areas of colour give your eye somewhere to settle, and they don't add anything to the surface of your desk, so you get colour without clutter.
The biggest flat surfaces available to you, in rough order of impact:
- A desk mat or mouse mat. The best value change you can make. It's large, it's flat, it sits right in the middle of your eyeline, and it takes up no extra space because it's already the thing your mouse sits on.
- A laptop sleeve, left out on the desk rather than shoved in a drawer.
- A pinboard or a print on the wall behind the desk, which does the same job vertically.
- The chair, if you're willing to go that far.
Sort the cables out
Unglamorous, and the highest-impact ten minutes you'll spend on your desk.
You don't need a full rewiring project. Three things cover most of it:
- Bundle what runs together. Cable ties, a scrunchie, a bit of washi tape at each end. Anything that turns four wires into one.
- Get them off the surface. Under the desk, behind the desk, taped to a leg. Out of your sightline is most of the battle.
- Go shorter where you can. Half the mess on a desk is excess cable length looping about with nowhere to go.
Contain the small stuff
Pens, clips, cables, lip balm, the four highlighters you actually use. These are what turns a nice desk into a busy one.
The fix is containers rather than fewer things:
- A pot for pens, in one of your three colours
- A small tray or dish for everything that has no home
- A drawer for anything you use less than weekly
The rule of thumb: if something isn't used daily and isn't there to be looked at, it doesn't need to be on the desk.
Leave some space empty
Aim for roughly a third of your desk to have nothing on it.
It sounds like a waste of a good desk, but empty space is what lets the colourful things read as choices. Every desk setup you've saved on Pinterest has more empty surface than you'd guess. It's just less noticeable than the objects.
Cheap ways to add colour to a desk
None of this needs to involve buying a new setup, and a few of the best options are free.
- Take things away. Costs nothing, works immediately, and is the step everyone skips.
- Line a drawer or cover a pinboard with wrapping paper. A cheap way to get a big block of pattern into a space, and you get a small hit of colour every time you open the drawer.
- Stickers on a laptop lid or a notebook, which is colour on a surface you already own.
- Washi tape along a shelf edge or around a plain pen pot.
- Move a plant onto the desk. Green counts, and it's the one colourful thing that improves how the room feels as well as how it looks.
- Change your wallpaper. Your screen is the biggest bright rectangle on the desk and it's free to change.
What if you've got a really small desk?
Go with fewer, bigger colourful things rather than lots of small ones, and use the wall.
Small desks punish clutter much harder than large ones, because there's no empty space to absorb it. Two colours instead of three is usually plenty. A desk mat plus one other colourful item will do more than six little accessories, and anything you can hang above the desk is surface you get back.
Our desk bits
We make a fair amount of this stuff, mostly because we wanted it ourselves and everything on offer was grey.
The mouse mats are the ones we'd point you at first, for the reason above: biggest colour change, no extra clutter. After that, laptop sleeves if yours currently lives in something dull, and the stationery for the small stuff that ends up in the pen pot.
If you'd rather just have a look at everything, it's all in the full shop.
Where to start
If you only do one thing: clear the desk completely, sort the cables, then put back only what you use. Add the colour after that. It's a much easier problem to solve on an empty desk than a full one.