Theme Guide - Color Theory
Takanu KyriakoPicking the right colours is often the most important and tricky process of building a theme, and there’s a lot of ways you can look at or approach colour selection. It’s a good idea to first spend a bit of time experimenting and picking out colours you like, as otherwise you might spend a lot of time adding them to Telegram only to realise that they didn’t work out the way you expected.
Places to Start
There’s no hard rules, but theres plenty of tools and concepts available to help you make better picks:
Use a Background or Image
If you have an image you want to use as a background for a theme or if you’re referencing other images for inspiration, it can help to pick out key colours from the image to create a set of core colours you want to use. Many themes on @themes and @androidthemes take this approach to theme-building, and it's a quick and easy way to find a set of great colors to build a theme from.
There’s a lot of tools and available to help you pick colors from an image, below is a small selection of some of the ones available:
Android - Color Harmony – Android Apps on Google Play
macOS - Digital Color Meter (find it under Applications/Utilities, using Finder)
Start with 3 Colors
Whether you're using an image to pick colors from or building your own set from scratch, it's best to pick out only a few distinct colors from which to build your theme, as using too many more often than not leads to a mess. Ideally, you should start with one or two highlight colours and a base background color that your highlights will clearly stand out from.
You can choose a separate font color for the bulk of your text elements if you wish, but starting with this will help keep your theme easy to read, coordinated and focused, and you can always use different shades and alternate versions of these colors when you start building your theme, as you need them.
Use a Color Generator
There’s a lot of tools online that can help you experiment with and pick a set of colours based on sets of common colour theory rules. It’s not going to instantly produce a set of winning colours, but they can offer a great way to experiment with and look at colour sets.
Further Reading
If you really want to get into colour theory, I recommend doing some good old-fashioned research. I’ve collected some of the best articles and discussions about colour below so you don't have to go digging:
A Simple Web Developer’s Color Guide – Smashing Magazine
Hex Colors: The Code Side Of Color - Smashing Magazine