I’m currently working on a new version of this website. This includes moving the site to a new static site generator (more on this in the future) and also a complete redesign of the site — for the first time since I relaunched my website for my new role as a freelance journalist in 2018. As part of this project, I’ve decided to come up with a new colour palette for the site — and by extension all of FAB INDUSTRIES.

I’ve been working on the palette itself for over a year now. It was originally inspired by retro ’70s and ’80s aesthetics, especially the school of actual and speculative industrial design that is now usually called Cassette Futurism. Good examples of this aesthetic are the original Alien movie and the 2014 Alien: Isolation video game. I adore the industrial design in both of these.

I had been working on the feel of the different colours for a long time when I recently came across a VS Code theme that i really liked and that did a lot of what I wanted to accomplish with my palette. I discovered that this theme was based on another theme called Retronica by Adham Mohamed Saleh. So I adapted my ideas to work with colours sourced from Retronica, since I liked these a lot and I like that they are based on Oklab / okLCH colours.

I have named my palette Cassette Retro and it is based around four blocks of 16 colours each. These blocks can be used on their own, but they are really designed to be combined. Think of the whole thing as a big 64 colour palette that you can mix and match from. The four parts of the palette are as follows:

Amber

Phosphor

Neon

Arcade

I used the first two colour blocks, Amber and Phosphor, to build my new website design, for example. Currently, the website is planned to only have a dark theme. Should that ever change and I would need a light theme, this is what I designed the Arcade block for.

I am pretty happy with the look and feel of the website theme that I have developed using these colours and I’ve used other parts of this palette for other projects already. But that doesn’t mean I won’t change things in the future, if necessary. But for now, I think this palette is in a good spot. Consider this to be version 1.0 of the palette.

Cassette Retro isn’t meant to be usable for projects that do not share my personal taste and it certainly isn’t scientific or designed by someone who pretends to know a lot about UI design and UX, but maybe it can be useful to someone or provide an inspiration for further modification. If you do end up using it, please let me know. I would enjoy that a lot!

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