# Solarized (ソラライズド)

> Solarized is a sixteen colour scheme for terminal and GUI applications published by Ethan Schoonover with every value in the open, eight monotones and eight accents. The monotones hold symmetric CIELAB lightness differences, so moving between the light and the dark background keeps the same perceived contrast. It lowers brightness contrast on purpose and lets hue relations, not brightness, separate one token from the next.

- IndexStyle No.538 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/solarized
- Kind: Style · Family: UI Expression · Era: 2011–
- Mood: Technique, Calm, Trust
- What this family collects: Every entry answers one question, namely how physical a button or a surface on a screen ought to look, and the answers keep swinging between adding material and stripping it off.

## Defining characteristics

- Backgrounds that are neither pure black nor pure white, one leaning teal and one leaning cream
- A small lightness gap between body text and ground, softer than black on white
- Eight accents at close to equal lightness, told apart by hue alone
- The same accent holding the same role after the background is flipped from dark to light

## Best used for

- Giving an editor or terminal one reading feel across both light and dark backgrounds
- Separating elements on a screen someone stares at for hours, without raising contrast

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: One monospaced face, carrying emphasis in colour rather than in weight or slant.
- Layout & structure: Divide regions by shifting the ground one step instead of drawing rules, and leave the ground generous.
- Material & texture: Hold to the eight monotones and eight accents, anchoring the ends at #002b36 and #fdf6e3 and taking body text from the middle greys.

## Colour

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

- Ground: #fdf6e3
- The colour it is remembered by: #268bd2
- Text and outlines: #002b36

## What to avoid

Borrowing only the backgrounds and inventing your own accents breaks the matched CIELAB lightness, and the scheme loses the very mechanism that lets hue do the separating.

## Application checklist

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

- [ ] Visible in the piece: Backgrounds that are neither pure black nor pure white, one leaning teal and one leaning cream
- [ ] Visible in the piece: A small lightness gap between body text and ground, softer than black on white
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Eight accents at close to equal lightness, told apart by hue alone
- [ ] Visible in the piece: The same accent holding the same role after the background is flipped from dark to light
- [ ] The layout follows: Divide regions by shifting the ground one step instead of drawing rules, and leave the ground generous.
- [ ] The lettering follows: One monospaced face, carrying emphasis in colour rather than in weight or slant.
- [ ] The material and surface follow: Hold to the eight monotones and eight accents, anchoring the ends at #002b36 and #fdf6e3 and taking body text from the middle greys.
- [ ] The colour relation holds: #fdf6e3 as ground, #268bd2 carrying the style, #002b36 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

- **Terminal UI (ターミナルUI)** — The terminal look: monospaced phosphor characters on black. The VT100's green afterglow became the primal image of the computer's face, repeated from hacker cinema to modern CLI tools. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/terminal-ui
- **Material Design (マテリアルデザイン)** — A design system that reduces the physical metaphor of paper and ink to rules of shadow and overlap. Elements are given elevation, shadow states the hierarchy, and motion carries physical cause and effect. It became the model for UI design being distributed as a system. The 2021 revision added colour derived from the device wallpaper, so the palette differs from one user to the next. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/material-design

## 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=solarized+terminal-ui

## Further study

- the point that the lightness differences of base03 to base0 and base02 to base1 are designed to the same value
- the eight accents being taken from fixed relations on the hue wheel
- how far ports to terminals and editors keep the published values

## Reference works

- Xcode 4 with Solarized Light applied, 2011 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solarized%20Light%20Xcode%204%20Theme%20(5592863390).png
- gedit with Solarized Dark applied — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gedit%20with%20Solarized%20dark%20Theme.png
- Wikipedia article page with Solarized Dark applied, 2021 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot%20of%20Wikipedia%20in%20Vector%20skin%2C%20with%20JPxG's%20Solarized%20CSS.png

## Source of record

- Ethan Schoonover — Solarized — https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/

## Machine surfaces

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