facet
theming
One interface, more than one palette.
22 terms across 3 categories · all facets
color
- Color harmonization
Nudging an outside colour's hue toward the current scheme so a fixed brand or status colour sits inside a generated palette without looking imported.
- Color scheme
The declaration that a page or element supports light or dark rendering, which also tells the browser which palette to use for scrollbars and form controls.
- Color theme
A complete named set of colour values a product can swap in whole, so light, dark, high contrast and per-tenant branding are the same mechanism.
- Dark mode
A second palette built on dark surfaces with light foregrounds, derived from the light one by rebalancing lightness and saturation rather than by inverting it.
- Elevation overlay
The older dark theme technique of laying white over a surface at an opacity that rises with elevation, because shadows are nearly invisible on dark backgrounds.
- Flash of inaccurate color theme
The moment a page paints in the wrong theme before the stored preference is applied, showing a light flash to a reader who chose dark.
- Forced colors mode
An operating system mode that replaces a page's palette with a small user-chosen set of system colours, overriding almost everything an author specified.
- HCT
Material's colour space of hue, chroma and tone, which borrows hue and chroma from CAM16 and lightness from CIELAB so tone alone predicts contrast.
- Inverse color
A surface and text pair deliberately flipped against the current theme, so a snackbar or tooltip reads as a foreign object that arrived from outside the page.
- light-dark()
A CSS function that takes two colours and returns the one matching the page's current colour scheme, collapsing a theme's light and dark values into one declaration.
- Scrollbar color
The thumb and track colours of a scrollbar, which a page can set explicitly or leave to the declared colour scheme so the browser draws its own dark variant.
- Seed color
The single input colour an algorithm expands into a whole scheme, so a palette becomes something derived from one decision rather than picked swatch by swatch.
- Selection color
The highlight painted behind text a reader has selected, which a page can restyle and thereby break the contrast the operating system had guaranteed.
- Static color
A colour deliberately excluded from theming because it sits on something that never changes, such as a label over a photo or a fixed brand mark.
- Surface tint
A wash of the primary colour blended into a surface in proportion to its elevation, so height reads as a colour shift rather than only as a shadow.
- System color keyword
A CSS keyword such as Canvas, CanvasText or LinkText that resolves to a colour chosen by the operating system rather than by the page.
- True black theme
A dark palette whose background is pure black rather than near black, which switches OLED pixels off entirely but makes elements look like they float in a void.
aesthetic
accessibility
- Increased contrast
A user preference for more contrast than a theme's default, honoured by strengthening borders, text, and state colours rather than by shifting hues.
- Inverted colors
A whole-screen colour inversion applied by the OS, which flips a design nobody tested upside down and turns every shadow into a highlight.
- Reduced transparency
A user preference asking for opaque surfaces instead of blur and translucency, honoured by swapping frosted layers for solid fills.