[ubuntu-art] The Zen of Color - painting in the dark.

[Daniel Scott Matthews]

I have also been wondering about color choices and I then realized it
does not matter.

This site is web focused but still relevant,
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/color-harmony/

The thing to note is that the exact colors matter less that the
relationship between colors because the set can be moved around in
color space while retaining the relationships between the colors.

The simplest example is the the color inversion where the set is
rotated 180 degrees around the color wheel.

Depending on the tools you use and how you manage your artwork it can
be easy to make such shifts to accommodate color (art direction)
decisions that have yet to be made (painting in the dark). A style
sheet for SVG artwork is one obvious way of having such easily
adjusted color schemes. In GIMP you can collect your colors into
layers.

I've mentioned this before in relation to to the automatic generation
of high and low contrast themes, but it also applies to any theme
design process. I'd like to see this methodology built into gnome one
day so the user can dial up their own custom color variant of any
theme. This is also an accessibility issue and sight and color
impaired users have special requirements when it comes to themes but
these needs can be empirically described and the required color space
transforms applied to any well designed theme.

N.B. there is one area where hue shifts can't be large without
changing the meaning of the artwork. e.g. a warning icon using red can
have it's meaning inverted if the color is shifted to green. In this
case some colors need to be collected into a group of protected
"semantic colors".