Color Palette

Introduction

A cohesive color scheme plays a pivotal role in producing publication-ready diagrams. Neural-Sketch offers a carefully curated palette crafted to ensure clarity, high contrast, and visual harmony across diverse shapes, containers, and annotated elements. By default, the package provides a handpicked array of tints—ranging from tranquil blues and oranges to subdued grays with soft pastel accent colors.

In typical usage, you can apply these colors easily by referencing their names—such as nskBlue or nskGray—in your shape or container definitions. Additionally, you can override or extend the palette to align with institutional or personal style guidelines.

Default Color Names

Neural-Sketch ships with a variety of built-in colors, each stored under a descriptive name—e.g., nskBlue or nskDarkGray. Internally, these macros point to carefully blended RGB or HTML hex values that have been selected to stand out elegantly in conference proceedings or journal publications. The typical naming structure resembles:

• Primary Accents: nskMainAccent, nskSecondaryAccent.
• Basic Tones: nskBlue, nskOrange, nskRed, nskGreen, etc.
• Gray Tones: nskDarkGray, nskLightGray, nskLightestGray, among others.
• Supplementary Accents: nskCyan, nskLime, nskMagenta, etc.
• Strong Hues: nskStrongBlue, nskStrongRed.

The naming convention is self-explanatory and helps you recognize each color’s intensity and purpose. For example, nskDarkGray is a dark shade ideal for borders or containers, whereas nskLightestGray is best used for subtle backgrounds.

Applying Colors

Employ colors simply by assigning them to style keys or to the fill= or text= properties when defining shapes or containers. For instance:

\nskBlock[
  id=exampleBlock,
  fill=nskBlue, 
  border-color=nskDarkGray, 
  text-north={\textbf{Blue Block}}
]

Neural-Sketch automatically takes care of any required transformations or style expansions, ensuring that the blocks (and text anchors) display the correct color.

Naming Conventions

neural-sketch employs a clear, standardized naming convention for all provided colors:

• Prefix: All colors are prefixed with nsk, denoting their origin from the Neural-Sketch palette.
• PascalCase: Following the prefix, the color name uses PascalCase, clearly denoting its identity and purpose, such as nskBlue, nskDarkGray, or nskMainAccent.

Example: To apply a red in a diagram, you would use:

\nskBlock[
  fill=nskRed!50,
  border-color=nskDarkGray
]

Color Mixing and Blending

Color definitions fully support TikZ's built-in color mixing syntax via the ! operator, enabling you to quickly create customized shades of any predefined color.

Basic Usage

To create a custom tint, simply append !<percentage> to any neural-sketch color:

\nskBlock[
  fill=nskBlue!30, % 30% of nskBlue mixed with 70% white
  border-color=nskDarkGray!75 % 75% of nskDarkGray mixed with 25% white
]

This syntax smoothly generates lighter shades, ideal for creating subtle highlights or nuanced diagram styling.

How the ! Operator Works

The general syntax is:

<base-color>!<percentage>[!<other-color>]

where,

• <base-color>: Any predefined Neural-Sketch color (e.g., nskRed, nskLightGray).
• <percentage>: An integer (0–100) indicating the proportion of the <base-color> in the mix.
• <other-color> (optional): The secondary color mixed with the base. If omitted, white is implicitly used.

Examples

Mixing with White (Default)

% Light pastel red (50% red, 50% white)
\nskBlock[
  fill=nskRed!50,
]

Mixing with Another Color

You can mix two distinct colors directly:

% Purple shade (60% blue, 40% red)
\nskBlock[
  fill=nskBlue!60!nskRed,
]

Advanced Example (Shades)

Here’s how a visually cohesive yet distinct diagram can be created using incremental shades:

\foreach \s in {20, 40,...,100} {
    \nskBlock[
      last-pos-s={right=0.5cm},
      fill={nskMainAccent!\s},
      text-north={\s},
    ]
  }

This produces a smooth gradient sequence from very a light nskMainAccent!20 to full intensity nskMainAccent!100, ideal for illustrating progression, intensity, or hierarchy clearly and attractively.

Color Reference

Below are listed the currently provided colors