MakeUseOf » palette

Solarized – A Crisp, Scientifically-Based Color Scheme For Your Apps

Erez Zukerman — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:31:21 +0000

Color is everywhere around us. For most people, color is about beauty or aesthetics. But if you spend your days in front of a computer monitor, color can be an important tool in the fight against fatigue and eye strain. Just about every text editor supports syntax coloring, and many editors come with an array of color schemes for you to choose from. There are virtually thousands of other schemes available online, and yet I’ve never seen one that’s quite like Solarized.

For starters, Solarized isn’t aimed at one particular editor or piece of software. You can get Solarized for Vim, Emacs, IntelliJ and six other editors, for four different terminal emulators, and even for Mutt (a console email client). It is also available as a color palette for Photoshop or GIMP.

Solarized author, Ethan Schoonover, did not just pick colors he felt were pretty. Instead, he used something called Lab color space to figure out the exact differences in lightness various screen elements should have, and selected the colors based on fixed color wheel relationships (some of the hues are analogous, some are Triad-based, etc.). Sure, the result is pretty, but it’s also very readable.

The Solarized color schemes are available both with a light and dark background. Here’s what the light-background variation looks like:

And here’s the dark variation of the same file:

You can see how similar both modes are. They feel like one color scheme, but both are very readable. In fact, they’re both readable to the same exact degree: they have symmetric lightness differences, so switching between dark and light background retains the same perceived amount of contrast between scheme elements.

It’s a minimalistic scheme, with just sixteen colors. The number of colors can even be brought down further, to just five specific hues, and it would still be quite readable.

Another thing that’s very impressive about Solarized is the presentation. Most color schemes are just a single text file with hardly any documentation. Solarized has a gorgeous webpage (colorized according to the scheme, of course), where the author lays down his reasoning for the scheme and its advantages in excruciating detail. The two screenshots above were taken from that very page, where you can find many other screenshots showing different file types in Vim, as well as many other applications.

I’ve been using Solarized for a few weeks now, mainly in Vim via Putty. For this particular scenario, installation was not trivial: I’ve had to configure Solarized for PuTTY, and then configure it for Vim as well. Even so, the colors I get on my own screen seem somewhat different from what I see on the Solarized website. I do like the look I ended up with, but you’ll have to agree it doesn’t look exactly like the beautiful screenshots above:

That’s the only drawback really. If you just use a single application (say, GVim or another local text editor), you should have no problem installing Solarized on your system. But if you need to get it working via PuTTY and Vim, you’re in for a bit of a challenge. Having said that, if any of you manage to replicate the exact Solarized look using Putty/Vim, I’d love to hear about it in the comments — perhaps you can teach me a thing or two!

How To Search For the Perfect Color Scheme

James Yeang — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:01:07 +0000

Color co-ordination is definitely not one of my strong suits. Ask my girlfriend and she’ll tell you what a mess I make just picking out matching clothes. For anyone like me who’s basically ‘design-challenged’, here are two awesome tools which will help you get perfectly color coordinated.

Search Color Schemes (Use Words)

Picking out a color scheme for your website? Not sure how to describe the actual colors you need? Try out ‘Instant Color Schemes’.

This excellent free service makes it easy for anyone to find an entire matching color scheme simply by typing in a word. For example, just search for ‘sunset’, and color schemes related to ‘sunset’ will be made available on the spot.

“Instant Color Schemes” makes full use of Yahoo’s image search API. How it works is that they take 5 related images from Yahoo Image Search and then show the most prominent 6 colors from each image and then find related colors to come up with the color schemes.

After some testing, it does work out pretty well in most cases. It did give me abnormal results once in a while (along with yellow and orange, pink and grey colors were displayed to me when I searched for ‘curry’!), but it looks to be a good product overall.

Search Color Schemes (Use Images)

Lost for words? If you are, you can let your favorite image do the talking. Sometimes words don’t cut it. This is especially true when you’re trying to pick colors to match certain objects, a painting or a statue for instance. Just upload a picture to Color Palette Generator and it will break down the key colors from within that photo and allow you to obtain a color scheme from that image.

Also of note is the fact that the source code for this project is available for free which means you can grab it, change and modify the code and put it to good use as well.

So there you go, two tools which will help you make the right decision about colors – all the time.

You might also want to check out The Best 3 Tools to Search for Images Online by Color by Ann.

How do you pick color schemes? I would love to hear your thoughts.

The Best 3 Tools to Search for Images Online by Color

Ann Smarty — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:01:30 +0000

Image search is evolving quickly. Today you don’t even need to use words to search images. Now you can use colors!. That’s right you can search images by color.

Let’s search the web for an autumn-like palette (yellow, red, brown) using the following 3 services. Let’s see how the search results are like.

1. PicItUp

PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.

Test it: search for [autumn] and choose any color from the left column (I chose yellow). Now let’s look at the results:

Impressive, isn’t it?

What the tool lacks: you can’t combine several colors to refine your search (for example you can’t search for a yellow-red palette) – you are only able to search for one color.

2. Multicolr

Unlike the above one, with the Flickr-based Multicolr (already mentioned at Make Use Of) service you can combine as many colors as you want.

Test it: choose several colors and watch how the image list changes with each color added (I combined red and yellow):

What the tool lacks:you can’t combine word-based and color-based searches with this service. You are limited with playing with colors only.

3. Etsy

Etsy, an online shop of handmade products, has developed color search for their own product database.

Test it: It’s real fun to play with. Just browse your mouse across the screen and watch various colors and same-palette products pop up.

What the tool lacks: here you are unable to either set the color option or the search term. Nonetheless the tool is such fun to use that you definitely need to try it out.

Now, what do you think could be possible practical applications for these tools?

Would you use them on a regular basis or are they just for fun?