On 20.12.2012 11:45, Armin Le Grand wrote: > Hi List, > > Talking about palettes is always difficult - at the end, it's a question of > taste. Nonetheless, we > need a palette which is by default installed with the office. You all know > the current one (for > years ;-)) which I think is far from optimal. Thus, I analyzed the current > one and want to share > my findings. From that, I want to propose a change for our next release. Also > probably not > optimal, but optimal in this field depends on the user's eye and cannot be > met by a single palette > anyways. > > Talking about palettes is also difficult since you need to 'see' something - > pictures say more > than words. To make that easier, I have prepared some data. Please look at > > A Impress document containing two slides > (http://people.apache.org/~alg/Palette/palette.odp) > The two slides as png's for convenience > (http://people.apache.org/~alg/Palette/palette.png, > http://people.apache.org/~alg/Palette/palette2.png) > > The following thext refers to figures there, so please take a look to see > what the text is about > (...if you want to continue reading ;-)) > > The current (old?) AOO Palette, It's made up of five groups (from my > perspective): > > (a) The 16 VGA colors: These come originally from the times where only 16 > colors were possible and > are in hex color notation exactly all eight combinations of red/green/blue on > or off, plus these > in half intensity. It *had* technical reasons, but these colors do not have > any special meaning > for the user today (well, for the programmer). Anyways, they are a result of > old technical > limitations. I think they are ugly and lead to ugly results when using them > directly (but that's > my impression). > > (b) The 'Main' Colors: 56 colors which try to build up to eight > gradient-stepped ranges, e.g. > orange. These ranges are *not* equidistantly spread, but somewhat wild/random > (see e.g. the reds). > I do not know where they historically come from, but I guess they were done > by a deveoper at these > days. There are some nice colors among them, but not too many. I always > search for useful colors > there > > (c) The Pale colors: These seem to be younger than the others, may have to do > historically with > the StarOffice 5.2 color theme, but I'm not sure. Not too bad, not too good a > selection. A group > of seven colors which form a nice kind of 'schema' and make your presentation > look 'acceptable' > when using them together. > > (d) The Chart colors: 12 colors used in the new chart module written some > years ago. AFAIK these > were added at that time especially to support the user having colors at hand > corresponding to the > default chart colors. Nice. Useful. > > (e) 'Nice' Colors: A sub-group from (b). One is fix, it's the mentioned 'Blue > 9' which is > currently the default color for objects and has to be in the palette. I > personally like (and often > use) 'Blue Gray'. These are a question of taste, I would reccomend the named > ones, but we need to > collect 'your' favorites here. Keep in mind to keep this number low (probably > 4-5) and do not > forget that the color you like were not choosen freely, but *because* you > were limited to the > offered ones, so it might be a compromize you are just used to. ...cut...
This is an interesting view at the different color groups! It would be great, if the UI would be able to distinguish those groups and gives hints to which group a color belongs to when hovering over the colors. Such an approach might also allow for defining additional custom groups (e.g. a group for the CI of an organization, various groups of colors for different projects, purposes, etc.). Of course, there would be a need then for importing, editing, removing such customized color groups. [The same might be interesting to do with predefined gradient fill patterns.] ---rony
