# Sailfish Silica (Sailfish Silica)

> Sailfish OS's QML language centers the mobile experience on edge gestures and Ambience: wallpaper color runs through translucent type and highlights, while the screen edge itself becomes back, close and switch.

- IndexStyle No.583 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/sailfish-silica
- Kind: Style · Family: Platform Screen Languages · Era: 2013–
- Mood: Futurity, Calm, Intimacy
- What this family collects: Design languages written down for a platform and published, from the vendors that shipped an operating system to the governments that had no reason to hide rules paid for with public money, every one of them recognisable at a glance.

## Defining characteristics

- Text and focus tinted from the wallpaper
- Translucent controls floating over dark imagery
- Layers peeled by swipes from screen edges
- Pulley Menu revealed by pulling, with generous spacing

## Best used for

- Mobile applications that concentrate one-handed navigation in edge gestures
- Coloring system UI and wallpaper into one personal ambience

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: Use light, large sans text and write only current state and next action.
- Layout & structure: Place content on one vertical plane and assign back, close and menu to edge and pull gestures.
- Material & texture: Start from a dark wallpaper, use one extracted highlight color and vary white transparency for primary and secondary text.

## Colour

Read off the reference works below, so a direction rather than a fixed palette.

- Ground: #F7F9FA
- The colour it is remembered by: #47D7C8
- Text and outlines: #152A33

## What to avoid

Dark wallpaper and thin type alone are not Silica. Edge gestures, Pulley Menu and Ambience color must form one operation model.

## Application checklist

Work through this before calling a piece an application of this style.

- [ ] Visible in the piece: Text and focus tinted from the wallpaper
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Translucent controls floating over dark imagery
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Layers peeled by swipes from screen edges
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Pulley Menu revealed by pulling, with generous spacing
- [ ] The layout follows: Place content on one vertical plane and assign back, close and menu to edge and pull gestures.
- [ ] The lettering follows: Use light, large sans text and write only current state and next action.
- [ ] The material and surface follow: Start from a dark wallpaper, use one extracted highlight color and vary white transparency for primary and secondary text.
- [ ] The colour relation holds: #F7F9FA as ground, #47D7C8 carrying the style, #152A33 for text and outlines
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Holo (ホロ)** — Google's design language for Android, introduced with 3.0 and pushed so hard that carrying it unmodified became a compatibility requirement for every 4.0 device. It rules a black ground with hairlines and lets a single cyan blue carry selection, focus and progress. It arrived as a guarantee as much as a look, since an app that asked for the theme by name would be drawn the same way even on a phone wearing a manufacturer's skin. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/holo
- **One UI (ワンUI)** — Samsung's design language for Galaxy devices. It cuts the screen at the height a thumb reaches most easily and calls the part above that the viewing area and the part below the interaction area, so titles sit high while buttons, tabs and dialogs are gathered low. Content is collected into containers with heavily rounded corners, the ground is either white or true black, and a single blue carries every accent. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/one-ui

## Compose it with something else

The dictionary can put this entry in a structural role and another in an accent role, and report where the two fight: https://indexstyle.org/compose?ids=sailfish-silica+holo

## Further study

- Sailfish Silica QML
- Ambience colors
- Edge gestures and pulley menus

## Reference works

- Sailfish OS Documentation — Apps and Ambiences — https://docs.sailfishos.org/Develop/Apps/

## AI interpretation

An AI-generated interpretation image exists for browsing convenience only — it is not a reference work: https://indexstyle.org/ai/sailfish-silica.jpg

## Source of record

- Sailfish OS Documentation — Apps and Ambiences — https://docs.sailfishos.org/Develop/Apps/

## Machine surfaces

- JSON: https://indexstyle.org/api/styles/sailfish-silica
- Image-generation prompt (legally clean): https://indexstyle.org/styles/sailfish-silica/prompt.txt
- MCP: https://indexstyle.org/mcp (tools: search_styles, get_style, compare_styles, compose_styles, find_related_styles; prompts: image-prompt, apply-style)