Drupal.org colours

What are those colours used on drupal.org? The background colour for this paragraph is #0d7dc1 and is the colour used on the top bar of the home page plus a few other places. I named it Drupal bright blue for some presentations because I recommended an almost identical colour many years ago and called that one bright blue.

The background colour for this paragraph is #0678be and is another blue used on Drupal.org. I call it Drupal medium blue because of the similarity to some medium blues I use elsewhere. This medium blue is similar to the medium blue mentioned below in the Drupalicon logo. On most LCD screens there is not much difference to the bright blue because LCD screens have trouble reproducing colour components at the edge of the range. The red components, #06 and #0d, are too difficult for LCD.

The background colour for this paragraph is #93c5e4 and is the light blue edge to the white area at the top of the Druplicon logo used at Drupal.org.

The background colour for this paragraph is #81ceff and is the official definition of the light blue edge to the white area at the top of the Druplicon logo used at Drupal.org, as specified by the Drupal Association at association.drupal.org/press/images. The Druplicon is also described at drupal.org/node/9068

The background colour for this paragraph is #0073ba and is the medium blue across the forehead and left side of the face in the Druplicon logo used at Drupal.org.

The background colour for this paragraph is #0077c0 and is the official medium blue across the forehead and left side of the face in the Druplicon logo used at Drupal.org, as specified by the Drupal Association.

The background colour for this paragraph is #00598e and is the dark blue used across the right and bottom of the face in the Druplicon logo used at Drupal.org.

The background colour for this paragraph is #004975 and is the dark blue grey used in the line around the edge of the Druplicon logo used at Drupal.org.

Why are recommended colours often different from actual colours? If an original image was created using Adobe products, including Photoshop, the products used to produce inaccurate colours. They let you specify colours using theoretical schemes, including CMYK, that do not match up to anything in the real world. The theoretical colour is then changed based on a guess at how the colour might look on a computer screen. often the colour guess was based on an old Apple computer when Apple computers used non standard graphics. Now that Apple has finished copying exactly the same everything as used by Intel and Microsoft, that one colour error is removed. Adobe eventually gave people the option to use actual colours.

For a while, Adobe continued damaging colours on the mistaken belief that all output goes to a printer. What were we going to do with the Internet, print every image and post it out? Stupid Adobe. Adobe finally fixed that problem years after every other image editing supplier. Just goes to show, money cannot buy you intelligence.

There could be any number of mistakes between the original drawing of the Druplicon and the current documentation. The new colours on the drupal.org site are closer to the colours recommended for the Druplicon than the colours actually used.

The following images are PNG versions of the Druplicon. The one on the left is the official download. The one on the right uses the official colours.
 

The following images are SVG versions of the Druplicon. The one on the left is the official download. The one on the right uses the official colours.
 

Editing SVG

How did I make the slight change to the SVG file? Editing SVG files is a fun story in itself. I started with Inkscape on Linux. That must be the purest open source approach you can use. Inkscape open the file, made the change, saved the changed file, but the save file was corrupt. I tried Inkscape on several computers including an old one on Windows. They all failed. I searched for issue reports and found several with all of them blaming the problem on old versions of Inkscape or on Windows. Hey, I used the latest version on Linux and it still failed with exactly the same problem.

The next step was to use a text editor because SVG files are text files. Every text editor on Linux failed. I eventually succeeded with Wordpad on Windows XP. Yes Wordpad dating from back when Bill Gates ran Microsoft. Just goes to show who was forward thinking a decade ago. Pity Microsoft cannot match that today (or Ubuntu or some other distributions of Linux).

So SVG is text but a modern form of text, UTF8 XML, and you need a good editor to edit modern text, you need an 11 year old Windows computer to edit SVG.

Conclusion

I prefer the brighter Drupal colours from the modern site and the Druplicon with the official colours, not the colours in the official downloads.