>>>Not to complain, but I also find the new colors hard to read. Not because of color blindness, they are just very light with not much contrast between them.
>>
>>Who needs to read the front page. It should just look nice. :)
>
>I like it on the other site he has, but on the UT front page, it looks strange sitting side by side with the center portion in green/gray. I've had custom colors for so long though that I may not be the best judge of what looks good. :o)

The custom colors have reduced the user complaints by 50% :).

Maybe I'm too old, but in almost every medium that started as black and white and gained color and then affordable color over the years (photography, printing, movies, TV, computer monitors, bubble jet/ink spitter printers, laser printers) there was first a move to show the hot dog stand color scheme (sorry for anyone's $2000 of therapy gone down the drain on mention of this), then the counter movement to tone it down. I've seen people watching movies with barely any color saturation, with all the characters deadly pale, just so they wouldn't be seen as enjoying the colorful new gadget like kids.

Why am I mentioning this? Because I remember BW TV, BW movies (when there were still new movies made that way), BW schoolbooks etc, and I really enjoyed each day when I'd get colors on each medium. Specially when it came to monitors - that's where I look most of the day, and that's where I was so happy to see the day when I got my first color monitor (several times... those would sell fast, we'd get new ones, sell again, and every now and then I'd be back on some BW junk, so I appreciated the time when I had color).

Enter Windows 3.x, in magnificent shades of gray, with an occasional red x or a green tickmark (and those were actually Borland's). Come Windows 95, some toned down sky blue (like the 95% humidity sky is here in the summer) and the rest, again, in even more 3d themed relief and bas-relief... shades of grey. NT4, same. Throughout the nineties, and by inertia deep into the naughts, the grayness spread through all the possible imitator software, websites etc etc...

The same behavior is typical of other public surfaces here - houses, lobbies, shops (except Walmart has gone stir crazy with their latest redesign, but it can't hide the ugliest mouse-fart-gray carts, gray floors and drab shelves), most of the cars until 2007. The amount of grey articles of wardrobe is enormous here. Just accidentally I looked again at a diaspora reunion pictures from home... and guess what, the only guy wearing gray lives here - everybody else was colorful. Just navigate to Panoramio and look at the streets of the world.

So, UT being drab and gray/olive for most of the content except the message area (aka "support", though after 12 years the name still hasn't become intuitive to me) is, to me, one of those things I never liked but learned to live with, seeing it as a part of the general trend into gray-drab-unsaturated all over the continent. The only things which are allowed to be bright and saturated are commercials, toys and price tags.

Occasionally, I Set Rant On just to air a few things (which would do better with washing than airing... maybe in some other life). As to whether multiple themes, color settings etc should be available on homepage of UT - I think it's not worth the while, specially when it's only a door to the room where we spend much more time. Now if my colors could extend to other areas... like the Upload Images area below, the toolbar below the message, various grids etc, would be nice. If that's not possible (or too much work for too little gain), no big deal.