treeger - Visual Design Philosophy

Filenames, thumbnails, paths, and selection state must be easier to identify than the surrounding chrome. Decoration never competes with content.

Color marks a small number of meaningful things: active destination, selection, focus, progress, a primary action, or brand identity. Repetition should reduce emphasis, not multiply it.

As a working target, strong palette colors should occupy much less than ten percent of a typical browsing screen.

Hierarchy should first use spacing, type scale, alignment, and subtle tonal surface changes. Borders and shadows are secondary. Color is not required to separate every section.

Core file operations should follow Android expectations. treeger’s personality comes through its wordmark, typography contrast, careful geometry, transitions, empty states, and customisable Home—not unfamiliar basic controls.

At rest, the interface is quiet. Selection mode, an active operation, an error, or a focused preview may raise visual emphasis temporarily. When the state ends, the UI returns to calm.

Normal themes should meet contrast, touch-target, text-scaling, reduced-motion, and color-independence requirements. Accessibility is not delegated to a later "high contrast" option.

Use three independent color layers:

Changing from Canopy to Ember or Bloom should primarily change the identity layer. It should not turn the whole workspace into a different-colored room.

The exact values require device testing; these are starting points, not approved tokens.

Pure white and pure black are unnecessary for large areas. The neutral foundation may carry a very small palette tint, but should appear neutral before it appears cream, pink, brown, or blue.

This preserves the work invested in the palettes while making them easier to live with. The theme chooser becomes closer to an identity/accent choice than a full surface recoloring system.

Multiple themes are not a goal by themselves. Every production identity pack multiplies contrast checks, semantic-state combinations, screenshots, component QA, and future design decisions. A theme should stay only when it expresses a meaningfully different product character that users value.

Current recommendation:

Use a progressive representation:

Folders can use a restrained outline or low-chroma fill. Pinned status should be shown by placement and an optional small pin marker, not a wholly different folder illustration.

For Peek and a future Spatial View, every file needs a visual tile. Use the real thumbnail when available; otherwise build a typographic thumbnail from a short, legible filename and extension. The absence of a preview should not exclude a file from the visual system.

The t remains the app icon and wordmark companion. Do not repeat it as generic decoration throughout the app. It can reappear subtly in launch, About, first-run, or rare truly empty states where product identity is appropriate.

Use a 4 dp base rhythm with a small named scale. Prefer consistent section and row spacing to one-off padding. Home may be generous; folder lists should remain efficient enough for scanning.

Permanent title bars, breadcrumbs, section headings, and ordinary list rows stay on Level 0 and use the same canvas. A section label and its content form one visual field rather than stacked color bands.

Separate levels primarily with tone. Reserve visible shadow for temporary things that truly float above content. The current sort menu is an appropriate elevation case; ordinary file rows are not.

Recently Used, Pinned, and Quick access should share one visual grammar:

This common grammar creates the foundation for a future Edit Home mode without making each section look like a separate mini-application.

Use a neutral canvas and a common section grammar. Recently Used may become a thumbnail-forward strip later; Pinned and Quick access remain clear destinations. Section labels should not all be large accent-colored serif headlines. One active or primary action may use identity color; repeated content icons should recede.

Favor information rhythm: icon/thumbnail, filename, then metadata. Sans-serif filenames and quieter icons should make a long list easier to scan. Selection and file type then have enough visual room to become meaningful.

Peek may use a darker neutral stage for visual content while keeping controls consistent with the rest of the app. Spatial View can be more expressive, but its navigation, focus, selection, and fallback tiles must still follow the same token, type, and state system.

These should feel close to Android conventions. Brand character appears through title type, selected controls, and geometry rather than colored full-screen backgrounds or custom versions of every standard component.