Hello! I’m proposing updating the color that GitHub uses for Kotlin to better match the modern branding with purple hues. This is open source on GitHub and I’ve submitted a PR here: Improve the Kotlin language color + match modern branding by ZacSweers · Pull Request #5383 · github/linguist · GitHub
One thing they require is wider community buy-in. I’m not entirely sure how that’s measured and what constitutes a quorum, but this seems the most apt place to seek it and I’d welcome your feedback!
Copying from GitHub PR discussion: Improve the Kotlin language color + match modern branding by ZacSweers · Pull Request #5383 · github/linguist · GitHub
The color that is proposed for the Kotlin in the PR: #664acc will end up being too similar to the following language colors.
Kotlin:
color: #664ACC (proposed)
Objective-C++:
color: #6866fb
Papyrus:
color: #6600cc
XQuery:
color: #5232e7
ASP.NET:
color: #9400ff
Arc:
color: #aa2afe
Classic ASP:
color: #6a40fd
F#:
color: #b845fc
Metal:
color: #8f14e9
NumPy:
color: #9C8AF9
Though it’s true that Kotlin’s current language color #f18e33 could also similarly match other language colors but developers have grown to identify the language by its color over the years.
It’s not that I don’t like the color but the incentive is too less and changing color will probably lead to unnecessary confusion.
I personally do not support this color change.
Agree, the change of color feels like is required.
copy-pasting from Github:
Would you mind explaining where this hex is coming from? I tried to search on their website for some branding guidelines but could not find anything significant. is it just from a random pixel from their logo?
I don’t think bespokeness is a good reason to not improve. I also don’t think anyone is relying on this to the point where changing it would cause actual workflow issues, especially when the current one doesn’t match any language branding.
Regarding the other colors - I’m sure there’s plenty of colors also within a few shades of the current one. I’d rather leave this to their CI, which actually has something that tests color similarity.
I couldn’t find official branding, so it is indeed based on the branding in their social media. Happy to replace it with something more official, or run it through something more technical like androidx.palette to extract a formal highlight color.