Project: Reducing Colors in Core

Hey folks! Over in #core-css, we’ve been trying to audit and simplify the CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. used in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. Part of that includes simplifying the colors used throughout wp-admin, and we could really use your guidance here.

We have an automated tool that will replace all the colors in WordPress’s CSS with the closest color in a given list – which will let us quickly standardize on a color palette. In fact, this demo reduced the number of unique colors from 201 to 100.

The main question we have: Is this color palette the correct set of colors to use (from @drw158 in Nov 2019)? I’ve also seen this g2 list, and I know there are some colors identified in the Figma.

Once we decide on a color list, we’ll also need some help checking over each screen to make sure the replacements look good and have sufficient color contrast. It would be great to get some volunteers working together from design, accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), and core-css. If you are interested in helping with this work, please leave a comment on this post, or drop a message in the #core-css channel in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.

For reference, here are some before & after screenshots of a few wp-admin pages using the current colors, and the same pages using this reduced set of colors.

+make.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//accessibility