Comment by Aardwolf
3 years ago
> breaking the 3 colour design principle
Is it possible designers have some principles that don't necessarily match real life usability? Only 3 colors is incredibly boring to me.
I see that hacker news also only has 3 colors, it's fine in this case because there's not much reason to have more. That doesn't apply to, say e.g., photoshop (and gimp following this too now for unknown reasons) only having 2-color icons, while multicolor ones are faster to distinguish visually
Note that the "rule of 3 colors" is about three hues. The full design will incorporate variations of those colors: brighter and darker, more and less saturated. Your brain actually thinks of these as "the same color", though HTML and CSS don't.
It's a design principle which is safe: it's not going to clash in an ugly way, or make combinations that are hard to read. They can be used (in conjunction with other design principles) to draw the attention where it's needed, and have the eye flow through the page without distraction.
"Safe" and "boring" are two sides of the same coin. I personally don't mind boring, and easily get aggravated by choices that distract. A truly great design breaks the safe principles, though usually at a high cost. (Usually, having tried and rejected many combinations.)
Gimp takes strange turns now and then, does but gradually improve over time. It used to be that fuzzy-select would cause immense lag practically every time. Now my biggest complaint with selection is merely that the rectangle select tool defaults to centred.
If it helps, you can enable the old style icons in preferences.
Let's not forget there must not be any contrast :)
Well, design principles aren't actually laws, but they follow trends so they change and evolve.