I regret the flight of color from everyday life. Most conspicuously in the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, and the items we keep in our pockets, the expression of color has been muted to a dull spectrum of grays, blacks, and whites. I like color; I like the visual interest, so I aim to imbue the site with colors to brighten up the sight while also providing the utility of segmentation.

Light Mode

There has been a lot of work done on building color schemes that match the human perception of color¹; however, after doing some investigation I decided to disregard those tools in favor of curating a color scheme based on the felt quality of colors.

I started with my favorite color: blue (specifically savoy blue). Then, I chose a light eggshell yellow background to give contrast without being too harsh.

After establishing the anchor of the color scheme, I looked to provide a disparate cast of complementary colors. The resulting choices were very arbitrary, but by from recolorization of ancient Mediterranean marble and pottery. An essential trait of the color scheme is that each color has to provide sufficient contrast² so that my eyes can segment the page(s) without much effort.

Dark Mode

I didn’t put a lot of effort into this. I just slapped my terminal color scheme here. I started with the dotgov³ theme, and then tweaked it until it looked approximately like this.

Footnotes

1. I mainly looked at the Oklab color space, whose goal is to maintain perceptual uniformity. However, when I strictly build a color scheme from it, I felt that it is was too smooth

   • it lacked the tension that I wanted to have on my site.
   ↩

2. Unlike many pastel color schemes that I enjoy but find more difficult to read. ↩

3. Derived from the iterm2 theme Dot Gov ↩