I really like a lot of the extra colors but I was also overwhelmed by the rainbow permissions. User, group, world are the organizing principle for me. World writeable is something I never want to have in my mind as similar to user writeable.
I don't mind the color scheme but I think they overdid it. Not every bit of the permissions needs a different color. That makes it harder to read, for me.
Each to their own of course, but I can't imagine _not_ using colours. It would be like using a code editor with syntax highlighting turned off. Madness!
Maybe it's just me but I like the "Strong use of color" better. I find it hard to quickly find the tool button I want when they're all monochrome. I'm sure I'd get used to it, but I can't really say the colors in the GUI are my primary distraction when I'm coding...
I never understood the lack of ability to select from the color palette. I saw it in way too many places. Why would you not just allow me to fucking pick any color I would like?
You can see this kind of trend in software that has to do with organization of whatever. You can pick between like 8 colors for your folders, for example, or labels. Like... is it too hard, or what is the reasoning? Laziness?
I love the idea of perceptually uniform color spaces, but I’ve found that in practice, they just make your UI look dull and murky. Something is lost without bright reds, greens, and (sometimes) yellows.
Nice write-up on the basics of color and accessibility. If you are like me and get lost in the seemingly unlimited choice of colors and palette options when designing GUIs, the sanest way to go about it is to 1) test for accessibility (WCAG, etc.) and 2) pick something that looks good (if you operate within the constraints of the first, you will find the range of the second narrow substantially).
PS.
As a Wise user I can say I was cautious coming to Wise for the first time post-redesign but I found it just as easy to work with, the GUI mostly gets out of the way like before. From designer’s standpoint I think getting rid of dark contrast blue areas helps visual hierarchy and overall the tones are not distracting but aesthetically pleasing.
Everything being the same color can easily lead to a feeling of being "in a maze of twisty passages, all alike". It's like gray dialog boxes that pop up more gray dialog boxes: technical users tend to have an ontological hierarchy in mind as they navigate so it's no big deal, but most people get quickly overwhelmed and feel lost/overwhelmed. [Not that I'm saying that simply coloring dialog boxes differently would necessarily help here! Just that them all being gray adds to the overwhelm.]
I strongly disagree that color aiding in use points to a larger accessibility problem — perhaps you just mean that if color is necessary for use you've got a problem (which I'd certainly agree with), but while I could get by in my everyday world with monochrome vision, I'm glad I have color cues all around me that aid me in distinguishing amongst objects quickly and with minimal effort.
It's a universal cross-app theming framework/guidance based on a customizable five-color palette... derived from a wallpaper that carries over to your apps ;)
IMO it's ambitious, perhaps excessively so. I work on a product that we white label and recolorize for various enterprise-scale clients who want adherence to their own color palettes, and there are often things that feel "off" when we change color palettes alone... simply because typography, whitespace, and color go hand in hand to create a brand identity. It's never as easy as swapping colors.
And then there's the underlying assumption that a user wants a single color identity to follow them across the aspects of their personal identity. I don't know about others, but I want my social apps to have a different "feel" from my corporate messaging and issue-tracking systems. As Bob Dylan puts it:
> "Red Cadillac and a black mustache... Pink petal-pushers, red blue jeans... I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods / I contain multitudes."
If Bob Dylan is implicitly criticizing your design framework's core assumptions in his latest studio album... you're by definition not Steve Jobs.
I don't see what one gains by limiting the number of shades of colour when designing a professional app (as opposed to a personal/art project where one might enjoy constraints). Just a mental satisfaction of 'I used less!'?
Multiple colours cost nothing, don't incur performance penalties, but do help make the UI look prettier and more finished. I'd be way more likely to spend time in an app if it looked beautiful, and by almost any metric, Windows 95 was not a thing of beauty. It had clarity, I agree, but it was far from the pinnacle of what humanity can achieve.
And all the millions of different colors would give people something more aesthetically pleasing to argue about than tabs versus spaces (two other transparently invisible but eternally controversial elements of programming language syntax).
- Some words or identifiers should always have a specific color
- The same thing should have the same color everywhere
- Good contrast
is at odds with:
- WYSIWYG editor that behaves like Word
If you give users the option to use all bold Comic Sans, someone will do just that - and other users they share their work with will have to bear the brunt of reading it. Silly example, but it goes to show that you really can't have it all. For every user that cares about one of these things, there's 9 others for whom having to read, understand and decide not to care about it makes the program more complicated than it needs to be.
I agree, my first impression was confusion over why they are making such a big deal out of a simple color palette.
I could be wrong, but it looks like they modified a website template which was originally meant for advertising a service or product, which could explain why it feels a bit strange and overwrought.
Also, I feel like [Base16](https://github.com/chriskempson/base16) is a better approach to the problem, by providing a framework rather than a single palette.
Regarding Discord, considering that everybody and their grandmother has a discord these days, I suppose having one for a color theme is not so surprising. There used to be IRC channels for everything, after all. It's a shame that Discord has gained so much traction, being a proprietary walled garden. That's a topic for another day, though.
edit: also just realized, if my theory about them using a template is correct, the "Join the growing X community" page with discord/slack widgets is probably also just part of that template.
I worry that this color scheme is very hard to maintain. It's a very opinionated color and heavy color scheme rather than a more generic supporting color-scheme.
It feels like at design style rather than a design framework.
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