Colour and e-ink
The app's colours and what the e-ink panel allows. Token values are on the Tokens page.
E-ink
Do:
- Static, high-contrast paper surfaces with restrained forest-green, sage, blue and muted-red accents.
- Clear outlines.
- Persistent scroll indicators.
- Immediate state changes.
- Static busy states: a busy button shows the hourglass in place of its label; other busy states are text.
- Visible focus and selection.
- Native Android font scaling.
Don't:
- Animate transitions, ripples, spinners, shimmer, fading scrollbars or moving hover cursors.
- Show a hovering pen icon anywhere, including search fields, popups and native writing pads.
- Make navigation wait for remote sync.
- Replace native ink with Compose stroke state or a WebView.
App palette
The Android app defaults to the website's palette:
| Role | Value |
|---|---|
| Accent | #315846 |
| Ink | #202b25 |
| Sage | #e8ede4 |
| Muted text | #626b62 |
| App and card backgrounds | #ffffff |
- The website keeps its paper-coloured surfaces; the app uses white.
- Android chrome uses
InkColorsandMaterialTheme.colorSchemefromui/EInkTheme.kt. - Dynamic system colours are never used.
- Colour BOOX and phone use the same palette.
- E-ink outlines (
#7c897b) and dividers (#b4bdae) are stronger than the website border, so controls and grids stay legible on e-paper and grayscale. - Body text stays dark.
- Avoid low-opacity text, large dark panels, gradients and decorative colour bands.
Backgrounds
- Backgrounds are white everywhere: navigation, settings, menus, dialogs and startup.
- The splash, recovery view and Android window background are white.
- There is no background colour setting.
- Native writing areas (PaperView/GPaper) stay white, with the user's ink and paper settings.
Accent and selection
- The theme accent (forest by default) marks primary actions, selected dates, selected tools, navigation indicators and focus rings.
- Selected tools, menus and phone destinations get a static pale accent fill (default sage
#dce6d7). - The fill always comes with a check, a 2 dp outline or Bold text. Never rely on hue alone.
Status colours
| Use | Colour |
|---|---|
| Meeting cards | A very faint tint of the calendar colour |
| Schedule timestamps and time ranges | Standard dark text |
| Upcoming ToDo dates | Blue #4d6895 (InkColors.Upcoming) |
| Urgent ToDos, high priority, errors | Muted red #9b3732 (InkColors.Urgent) |
- Keep the existing date labels and priority wording.
Selectable palette
Pens, calendars and the theme colour choose from 11 fixed colours:
| Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Black | #000000 |
| Gray | #888888 |
| Light gray | #BBBBBB |
| Red | #CC3333 |
| Yellow | #DDBB00 |
| Green | #228844 |
| Teal | #008888 |
| Blue | #3399BB |
| Purple | #663399 |
| Navy | #334477 |
| Forest green | #315846 |
- Pen selection offers these 11 swatches. There are no custom RGB controls.
- Grayscale panels offer only black, gray and light gray.
- Stored handwriting keeps its actual colours.
- Pen swatches and stored stroke colours are drawing content, not UI theme colours.
Theme color
- Settings → Display → Theme color offers the same palette, with one selection and “Cancel” / “Save”.
- The choice is device-local, recolours controls and highlights immediately on Save, and survives a restart.
- Light choices use darker accent tones so text and controls stay readable.
- Paper stays white.
- App-bar layout, font sizes and spacing do not change.