GNOME colors

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim helixcode com>]

[I'm Cc:ing this to Tuomas, since I'm unsure if he's on this list, and he's
had more to do with GNOME's visual image through the ages than anyone else,
so I'd love to hear his opinion]

I was playing with some GNOME site mockups today. Nothing even close to
finished yet, more like an exercise for myself, to see what sort of
structures worked, and if I came up with something that "clicked".

And I started thinking: What colors are representative of GNOME? We've had
quite a few color schemes on GNOME web pages, varying both through time and
from site to site. I've put up a little comparison chart, with the current
www.kde.org colors included for reference, at:

http://www.avmaria.com/colorschemes.png

So what do we want for the new GNOME pages? There are obviously certain
things that are given (and I've mentioned them in the design document draft),
such as legibility dictating probably black body text on white background for
the main text of the site, but beyond that, it's fairly open.

Personally, I'd like the color scheme we use to be strong (the current
www.gnome.org pages are fairly strong, but I was a little wussy in my choice
of the pastels, on the other hand, the old GNOME page, and Gnotices, has a
very strong red that I like, but the other colors are very weak), and
distinctive (I ended up playing with blues in my new mockups, since blues are
very safe, but they're also very KDE, so we should probably stay away).

I'm wondering what people are seeing as GNOME colors. What colors "say" GNOME
to you? It'd be great if people came up with simple color comps before we
started doing actual site mockups. Just make an image with the colors you
think we should use put beside each other. It can be even more simple than
the ones I've done in my overview. It'd be great to come up with the
following, at least:

Background color, body text color, link colors, alternate background color
(for boxes, etc) with the text colors to be applied on the alternate
background, and a couple of accent and emphasis colors. There can be more,
but these are the minimum colors a scheme should have to be flexible enough
to fit the entire site.

If you can't be bothered to make some color comps, please follow up to this
thread with some thoughts about colors that you feel fit GNOME.

When we have some agreement on this, it should go in the design document.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Helix Code web monkey - joakim helixcode com - Radagast IRC
      FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
            http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.helixcode.com/