The other day I spent a good hour trying to create a colour palette that looked good.
The first pain point is that exactly what primary through quaternary controls is a bit ambiguous.
I understand that you can only explain so much in text but in practice the only real way to know what the colors will change is to do a hard refresh every time. This also made it pretty time consuming.
The second pain point is that the single “primary” and “secondary” colours secretly computes a whole series of other colors that are used like --primary-low and --primary high, etc. I’ve noticed that using a colour like #2b2b2b gives a very different result than a similar dark color with a bit more blue, because the generated palette ends up being very different. It just feels like a shot in the dark every time I try a new color because the resulting colours end up being unpredictable. I appreciate the simplicity of having basically three variables control the entire palette but the result ends up feeling very stochastic
Finally, I have a lot of problems with contrast. I find that with the colors I was picking, it was a tradeoff between the contrast of the text to the background, the contrast of the horizontal rule to the background and the contrast of the reply/edit buttons and the background. Ex. Increasing the contrast of the text made the rule hard to see and vice versa.
I am not really asking for anything to be done here though. I guess a solution would be to increase the size of the palette to enable more flexibility. But I understand the benefits of keeping it simple. Some sort of real-time preview would be helpful but I also understand that this would be a low priority request
I just wanted to document my experience. Ultimately I was able to create a palette but was not completely satisfied with it. Curious if others faced similar challenges, or maybe the problem lies with me? Advice appreciated
