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by btown 1865 days ago
It's a universal cross-app theming framework/guidance based on a customizable five-color palette... derived from a wallpaper that carries over to your apps ;)

IMO it's ambitious, perhaps excessively so. I work on a product that we white label and recolorize for various enterprise-scale clients who want adherence to their own color palettes, and there are often things that feel "off" when we change color palettes alone... simply because typography, whitespace, and color go hand in hand to create a brand identity. It's never as easy as swapping colors.

And then there's the underlying assumption that a user wants a single color identity to follow them across the aspects of their personal identity. I don't know about others, but I want my social apps to have a different "feel" from my corporate messaging and issue-tracking systems. As Bob Dylan puts it:

> "Red Cadillac and a black mustache... Pink petal-pushers, red blue jeans... I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods / I contain multitudes."

If Bob Dylan is implicitly criticizing your design framework's core assumptions in his latest studio album... you're by definition not Steve Jobs.

2 comments

Great, so now my enterprise is going to dictate my wallpaper so that my app themes are consistent with internal style guidelines. Thanks Google!
My wallpaper is solid black. What palette do I get with that?
Black, White and some different shades of grey.

I'm guessing but I would have thought that that would be what it would derive from solid black.

Indeed, the UI is all gray if the wallpaper is black: https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1385003175501963266