Carbon One

Stable Release — clarity, contrast, and calm.

A carefully balanced light theme built on the principles of IBM’s Carbon palette and Atom’s One Light. Carbon One was created with a single goal: to make code readable and comfortable under real-world office lighting. Tested through months of daily use, it reconciles WCAG contrast standards with perceptual comfort, producing a background that remains stable and legible even in bright conditions.

Example using JetBrains Mono

ℹ️ The name Carbon One honors the work behind IBM’s Carbon Design System and Atom’s One Light theme. This project is not a reinterpretation or a series —it is a single, finished experiment in light, designed to achieve a balanced state between accessibility and visual ease. The HAL-9000 console icon was chosen to echo that sense of precision and restraint.

🔧 Installation

1. Open the Extensions tab in Visual Studio Code.
2. Search for Carbon One.
3. Click Install.
4. Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P or Cmd+Shift+P) and select: Preferences: Color Theme → Carbon One.

📁 Repository

Find the source code here:
👉 github.com/zherar7ordoya/Carbon-One

🧠 Author

Made with 💙 by Gerardo Tordoya
Analista Funcional y Programador de Sistemas de Información

📜 License

MIT © 2025 Gerardo Tordoya

📌 Notice

See CHANGELOG.md for version history.

🧩 Design Notes

The development of Carbon One spanned several months of experimentation. The process began with the search for a neutral gray background optimized for long reading sessions. Early tests using albedo values and WCAG contrast metrics revealed the limitations of purely numerical criteria: high compliance did not always mean visual ease.

Further research included perceptual studies from Carnegie Mellon University on dyslexia-friendly colors, albedo-based luminance models, and extensive trials under different office lighting and monitor glare conditions.

The final direction came from IBM’s Carbon Design System, whose palette resolved many of the conflicts between contrast, consistency, and comfort. The theme’s tones were adjusted within WCAG limits but prioritized subjective legibility —how the eye perceives focus and rest across time.

A decisive influence also came from Atom One Light, whose restrained palette demonstrated that readability could emerge from economy rather than abundance. Its carefully balanced hues redefined how syntax color could signify meaning beyond Microsoft’s traditional schema. Carbon One acknowledges that lineage — an homage to the clarity and conceptual precision that made that theme a quiet masterpiece.

Typography also proved decisive: after testing over thirty monospaced fonts, JetBrains Mono provided the best balance of legibility, rhythm, and endurance.

Carbon One is therefore not an aesthetic variation but a synthesis: a light environment designed for the realities of coding in daylight, where clarity must coexist with calm.