🔗 The aesthetics of color palettes

I just saw screenshots of the Amiga classic “Another World” zip through my timeline.

..and it really drove home to me how distinctive the color palette is in that game. That game is praised for its art style and I think people most often mean the shapes, but the colors play a part that is just as important into building its aesthetic.

My artform of choice has always been music, but amusingly enough a friend once called me a “visual” person and I think that comment wasn’t too off the mark.

Ultimately, I exercised my visual muscles through software. I always paid attention to colors, and thinking about this made me think of how I centered the GoboLinux visual identity around its palette back in the day (archive.org copy from 2006). It was weird seeing that color scheme become a tech cliché for startups 10-15 years later.

htop’s visuals was also very centered around its color scheme. I picked cold colors deliberately, focusing of cyan (because I like it) and green (for that Matrix-y look; it was 2005 after all, and I wanted to use a UI like the ones we saw in movies; top circa 2005 looked like an 80s bank terminal). Hot colors only appeared in the htop UI very sparingly, as red accents (”red alert!”).

Seeing other top-like tools use the same colors made me feel like “I made it” as a dilletante graphic designer.