Conflicting / confusing instructions regarding UI color
asked 2014-02-07 17:28:58 +0200
On the page for Theme.primaryColor and the rest of the colors here, the following descriptions are given:
Theme.primaryColor- the default Label colorTheme.secondaryColor- used to paint the less prominent parts of the UITheme.highlightColor- adds emphasis to active and selected areas of the UITheme.secondaryHighlightColor- a less prominent highlight color
This gives me the impression that Theme.primaryColor is the default color for elements such as text labels (as is stated in the description) and Theme.highlightColor is meant to color the areas of the UI that are active, highlighted and which the user should focus on.
This is conflicted by the information given on the common pitfalls page, which states that
There are few exceptions, but in general buttons, switches, list elements and other items that react to touch input are colored with white primary color, and descriptive items like static labels, page and section headers are painted with the ambience highlight color.
After this, an example is given about using Theme.highlightColor for a long piece of text containing the terms of use for an imaginary program.
The pitfalls page seems to suggest that text labels should be colored with the highlight color instead of the primary color and that the elements the user should focus on (elements to click on) should be colored with the primary color. This conflicts with the information given in the SDK manual where the highlight color is reserved for active and selected areas of the UI and the primary color is the default Label color.
I think that color separation for clickable parts of the UI is a good idea, but currently the descriptions seem to be in conflict with eachother.
Related to this, I think that the color names can be misleading, because primaryColor is more bright and highlighting than highlightColor, which actually blends with the background and doesn't really pop out of the screen.