Week 5: Colour Theory for People Who Should Know Better

Week 5, palettes, contrast, and why every rice is ultimately Gruvbox or Catppuccin

22 March 2027

You already know more colour theory than you use. This lecture is aimed at the gap between the two. We cover the parts that actually govern a desktop: contrast ratios and why your beautiful low-contrast theme is unreadable by lunchtime, hue families and why a palette needs restraint more than range, and the difference between a colour scheme and a colour system that survives contact with a new application.

Then we confront the convergence. Ricing has a gravitational pull toward a handful of palettes, and almost every setup you admire is, underneath, Gruvbox or Catppuccin or one of their cousins. This is worth taking seriously rather than mocking. These palettes won because they solved the real problem, legibility across dozens of unrelated programs, better than the ones you would invent in a weekend. The interesting question is not how to avoid them but what it means that taste, given freedom, keeps arriving at the same six schemes.

In this lecture#

• contrast and legibility: the constraints a palette cannot negotiate away
• building a system, not a scheme, so new apps do not break it
• why Gruvbox and Catppuccin keep winning
• accessibility as a design discipline, not an afterthought

Before next week#

Choose a palette and apply it to your terminal and one other program. Notice where the two disagree about what “background” means.