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". -- ubuntu-art mailing list ubuntu-art@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art