An old friend, artist programmer, saw the default avatar DC Desktop shows for chats(when no one has set an image) and said the colors don’t look good. He said something about “saturation”. I don’t have access to him anymore. But I also think the default colors are not good.
For instance in the image above, the first one from top really looks bad. The two other are better but not still very good. I can just say if it looks bad or good. But I can’t say what is the problem with these colors, and that how we can fix them.
I think that’s subjective. But it might make sense if users could choose the background color and the color of their nickname themselves. For example, my name is dirty brown, which I don’t like.
Why is the “G” of your lowest profile shifted so far upwards?
while there are always better or worse colors, they’re pretty good in general, esp. if you look at the number of colors.
before, we had some manually curated colors, they might have been nicer when looking at a single one, but not overall.
also note, the colors need to fulfil quite some criterions: contrast to black and to white, work as a text-color on light and dark backgroound, being noticable on a map and harmonize together while being different enough. tweaking a single parameter for some presentation (eg. “saturation”) will have drawbacks in other parts
there are not really plans to iterate here.
as pointed out above - if one is not happy with ones color, set an avatar.
Related to UI issues with default avatars, I noticed the avatar with letter X looks like the “cancel” button, which can be confusing because the first reaction to seeing an avatar any time with letter X is to think it is the cancel button. Stylizing the letter X could solve this issue, but people can also set an avatar as it has been pointed out, so it might not be worth addressing if there are more important things to work on.
We use XEP-0392: Consistent Color Generation with saturation set to 100% and lightness to 50%. Lightness cannot be easily changed because we then need to set it to different values for dark and light theme, while 50% always looks good. Saturation can indeed be reduced.
You can play with it on https://www.hsluv.org/, set L to 50%, S to some value (currently it is 100%, but we can set it to 50% or 70% if it looks better) and then make sure it looks good for all values of H which we don’t control.
I played a bit with it, and even with 75% saturation it looks worse to me. It also affects the color of the names displayed in group chats and as the names turn greyish it is more difficult to read them on white background.
Another problem with fixed colors is, that if you have similar colors in one group, let’s say green and slightly darker green, you can not distinguish the paths in the location service. I know a case were someone keeps creating accounts to get a unique group color to be able to get another color for its location line.
