
Nord: An arctic, north-bluish color palette - tpetry
https://www.nordtheme.com/
======
semi-extrinsic
Aargh, it's kinda pretty and I _want_ to like it, but it really bugs me that
these colors don't actually match their descriptions. It feels like an
"arctic" color map made by people who have mainly seen the far north on
Instagram.

Especially the "Aurora" palette, which is made up mostly of colors that are
extremely rare to see in auroras. But also the light and dark palettes without
any blue in them are way off, and the description of arctic ice as green-ish
is weird.

Also the visual contrast between e.g. nord7 and nord8 is extremely poor.

~~~
e12e
Not sure why you're down-voted - that was my initial reaction too. Especially
the "aurora" palette seems at odds with the name. Add a red and a purple to
the "frost"-palette, and you might at least call it "aurora" with a straight
face. That said, I'm not sure pastels like these would ever capture an "artic"
feel.

Overall, apart from the lack of contrast, they're not half-bad. But the naming
doesn't seem to reflect the colors - it seems rather arbitrary.

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jawns
I have seen lots of color palettes that look just as nice as these.

But in terms of _marketing_ and _positioning_ a color palette, this is a
really superb effort.

The Nordic inspiration and theme, the association of emotions (peace, balance)
with colors and color combos ... it's all extremely well done.

Anyone else looking to market this type of work would do well to study it.

~~~
trentlott
I'm baffled why people are suddenly marketing CSS themes

Is it just a demonstration of skill?

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bryanrasmussen
Sometimes in the North the light will shine too brightly off the snow and
blind a person a bit
[https://color.a11y.com/Contrast/](https://color.a11y.com/Contrast/) finds 10
color contrast issues.

And really some of the color combinations were just obviously not going to
pass.

But I agree it's pretty nice, and the marketing is mad men quality for a color
palette.

~~~
willio58
Why should every color pallet follow accessibility standards? Especially when
it is for personal use..

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I assume that persons with poor eyesight may want to use things in their
capacity as persons. But sure one can decide to not provide the possibility.

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ZeroGravitas
Sounds like this project may be intending to write one, but is there any
existing documentation on syntax colouring that goes beyond "what we thought
looked nice"?

For example, what should have similar colours and why, what should stand out
the most. How far apart do two colours need to be to be effective for the
various tasks involved in writing and understanding code and so on. Is there s
trial research on this?

~~~
ninjaranter
> Sounds like this project may be intending to write one, but is there any
> existing documentation on syntax colouring that goes beyond "what we thought
> looked nice"?

I tried to do something link this with a color scheme for VSCode
[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=narenran...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=narenranjit.chandrian)
. Some highlights:

* Warm Colors are used for action keywords - throw, return in programming languages, links in Markdown files.

* Cold colors are used for definitions - Function names, variable values etc.

* Muted neutral colors are used for punctuation, comments, and anything else which detracts from the code.

I've been meaning to write a more detailed post on this (as well as an
update), but comments/feedback welcome!

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danaliv
These are lovely! I might use this in some cartography work.

Do these palettes take color blindness/accessibility into account? I looked
around on the site (admittedly not thoroughly) but didn’t see this addressed.

~~~
arkades
Speaking as a colorblind person browsing that page:

I don't think they did.

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gfiorav
I’ve used this theme for 3 years or more now and I can’t live without it.

It’s soothing and distinct at the same time. I have everything in this color
range. There are few themes with such a wide range of ports. The support is
fantastic too! Everything is on github and monitored.

Give it a spin, you won’t regret it!

~~~
krtkush
Any link to your works that uses this theme?

~~~
gfiorav
Sorry, I now realize I've been very sloppy with my wording: I use this as a
Terminal theme (Windows Console Host) [0] (you need ColorTool, which supports
iterm format for themes), a vim theme (nord-vim) [1], for dircolors [2], and a
tmux theme (nord-tmux) [3].

[0] [https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord-
iterm2](https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord-iterm2)

[1] [https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord-
vim](https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord-vim)

[2] [https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord-
dircolors](https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord-dircolors)

[3] [https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord-
tmux](https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord-tmux)

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dpflan
Interesting. I've had the idea for generating palettes based upon captured
nature scenes or animals, especially birds and fish. Now that I think about
it, take it a step further to include the habitat, and there you go: ecosystem
palettes.

~~~
hoyd
I wrote a simple web app to find the five most dominant colours in a photo,
and present them as a bottom layer to the uploaded photo with the hexadecimal
code included. So much used, at least by myself I love to see detected colours
in all sorts of scenes or motives.

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aaronkjones
I have used Nord for years and added it in [https://noobs-
term.com](https://noobs-term.com) (terminal configuration).

Coworkers commented on how nice my terminal looked and wanted to replicate it.

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axiomdata316
Looking at the Github page it doesn't look like it's maintained very well.
Some of the work on ports haven't been updated for 2 years.

~~~
majewsky
Do you have any specific reason to imply they're not maintained? Most of those
ports look like "Done" to me. When something is Done, then it's a _good thing_
they don't mess around with it for no good reason.

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bjourne
The theme looks a lot like Solarized dark but with a little more blue. I don't
really "get" why I should prefer this theme to any of the many other color
themes out there.

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harrygeez
I tried this several months ago. It's beautiful, but I find it lacking in
usability. The lack of contrast is a little more straining on my eyes than I'd
like

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jackfraser
MS-DOS Shell called, it wants its aesthetic back

~~~
mmgutz
That would be Cobalt2 which is another fantastic blue-based theme :)

