I very much appreciate,
thedeadman, that you are so forthcoming with you work and transparent with your design principles and decisions. I hope you don't mind that I will give some personal suggestions regarding the design in this post.
Just a small kudos, now over to the issue… I tried to play around with the colour contrast, but it was harder than I thought to get a satisfactory result. Mainly, this is due to this being a monochromatic skin, which only leaves one dimension in which to create contrast. On my monitor, I managed to get the contrast in the settings menu better by lowering the saturation of the "unselected" item.
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<colors>
<color name="black">ff111111</color>
<color name="selected">fff0f0f0</color>
<color name="unselected">ff787878</color>
<color name="disabled">ff515151</color>
<color name="accented">ffca1a1a1</color> # Is this tri-hex value wrong? "ca1a1a1" has 1 too many characters
</colors>
I do like the use of "[ ]" in the skin of as highlighters, as it bypasses the whole contrast problem. Perhaps this is an idea that should be explored more?
Though, I noticed that the "disabled" colour is contrasted with both the "black" and the "selected" colours depending on the menu one is accessing. If the "disabled" value is set to a high value, e.g. '<color name="disabled">ffa1a1a1</color>, it is clear in some of the menus using "black" as the default for the font that an item is disabled.
Image #1
However, in the inverted menus where "selected" is used as an default, there is very little contrast between items. The image below actually looks a lot better on my computer screen than what it does on my LCD-TV. On my TV it is almost impossible to destinguish the disabled items from the rest.
Image #2
I would suggest, if it is possible, to replace the "disabled" colour with two new colour items. One which is darkish and used when the default typeface colour is light, and one which is lightish and used when the colour is dark.
And one last thing: I have also noticed that there is a mix of rounded curves and square angels used throughout the skin. Have you considered to just use one type? I do like the square angles the best, but I realise many would probably disagree with me on this matter.
