We’ve had a long-standing bug (https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/1991) that our default colors aren’t great for color-blind folks.
Now that we have saveable color sets in 5.99, would anyone like to contribute one for color-blind folks that we could ship with the product?
It’s been on my todo list to make a new default color scheme to ship with V6 but I haven’t started yet. Thanks for putting out this call, Jeff!
(One of the first things on the list in my opinion is to change the default front/back copper colors from red/green to red/blue, and adjust all the colors now that they are not based on XOR mixing to optimize for contrast and distinction on high layer-count designs)
For default (normal sighted) schemes you can take inspiration from here:
Great.
According to tests I have normal color vision but I have always found difficult to distinguish between dark hues of green and blue. It has not been a problem in KiCad, though.
Dark blue on black background is very annoying, whether in a linux console or in a CAD drawing. I’m forced to change Cmts.User and B.Fab colors if I happen to need those layers.
In general I have found KiCad color scheme to be too dark, but it may depend on me preferring low brightness in monitors. Maybe there could be a brighter theme based on the default one if the default can’t be made brighter?
The current default scheme is definitely too dark, this is an artifact of the old way that KiCad did color mixing which didn’t really allow for lightened colors.
I hope you can take a look at the color set used by Altium / Protel. It is nice and bright.
It’s a bit off-topic here, but are there any plans for making the “Dark” style interface for KiCad?
Like VisualStudio, recent Altium etc?
Something like my quick play with Paint.NET (I know the icon colors are not pretty when reversed):
Since on some platforms, “dark style” for the UI widgets can already be forced, so we have been looking at it. The first big step is to create two sets of icons (for light and dark backgrounds) and automatically switch between them. Ian is working on that, see https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/3923
At Cadnetix times we had a color blind employee what had big problems with the color scheme not working like it should. Some of the schematic colors were anchored in library what always required to switch the scheme after placing a new symbol. There I learned about different color blindness. Only a few of them see black and white, others only mix up green and yellow or grey and blue. For RGB nerves it seems there are 2³ different combinations of defects possible and red/green failure is the most probable one. That makes difficult to have a scheme for the “color blind” designers. If the setup scheme presets doing what they should, each of the users can setup its own preferable colors in comfortable way
This is true, but that doesn’t prevent us from (a) trying to improve KiCad’s default scheme for the majority of users, and (b) accepting contributions of multiple schemes that might work better for different subsets of users.
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