Palm OS Color Support
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Background

Palm introduced color with the release of the Palm IIIc in 2000. Palm needed a color scheme for the OS and new color versions of all OS graphic resources.

The project

The Palm HI Team had two members at the time—my manager and myself. We had approximately one month to develop a system-wide color scheme and palette and to add color to all OS icons and graphics.

We hired Susan Kare, who developed the original Macintosh icons and fonts, to refine the existing Palm icon set. Meanwhile, I concentrated on working with OS engineers to determine what we could and could not do in terms of color support. I experimented with dozens of color options, including a version in which buttons and other HI widgets were defined by color fills, not black pixel outlines. Removing a black border reduced the height and width of every element by two pixels—a considerable size savings on a 160x160 screen.

In the end Palm product marketing chose to stick with a more conservative color implementation.

 

 
Palm Color icons

Colorizing the backgrounds of Palm OS icons would inevitably have a huge impact on users’ perceptions of Palm products and brand. We chose a light blue to family with Palm’s blue-heavy corporate color scheme.

 
Black-white Palm   Color Palm  

The Palm OS could support 8-bit color, but OS colors were limited to the Web palette. Much of the original color implementation was shaped by the technical limitations of the Palm OS graphics routines.