[Design] [F/b] Multiple calendar colors

[Mimi Yin]

We've had several comments about providing feedback, it's definitely  
something we've been planning to do, it's simply a matter for  
staging. At this point, we'd like to explore some relatively low-cost  
options for 0.7.

This is a hard problem to solve for a couple of reasons:
+ There is nothing stopping an overzealous user from putting a single  
event into 20, 30, 40 different calendars.
+ The calendars are represented by colors and some colors are bound  
to repeat.
+ Colors themselves are poor representatives for calendar  
collections. (ie. What does blue have to do with my Work calendar.)
+ Most people start tuning out beyond 5-6 colors, as in it's really  
hard to remember what they all represent.

Thankfully however:
+ In the short-term single events living in more than 1 calendar will  
be relatively rare. (Taken as a percentage of all the events you have  
across all of your calendars.)
+ Events living in more than 2-3 calendars will be even less likely.
+ We don't really need to make the colors readable beyond 5-6 colors/ 
calendars. By that point, it's no longer important for the user to be  
able to decipher "exactly which calendars" an event is a member of,  
instead it's enough just to convey that it IS a member of many  
calendars. (We could also try a fish-eye approach where we allot more  
real estate to communicating which "checked" calendars an event is a  
member of and leave the "other calendars it's also a member" in more  
of a jumble - Haven't mocked this up yet.)

Given that "colorizing" the entire event lozenge won't work because:
+ the resulting rainbow effect will make the event time and title  
unreadable....
+ treating all of the calendar colors equally confuses which calendar  
(color) you are currently looking at

We've mostly been looking at ways to communicate "multi-calendar"  
residency by "striping" the event status bar on the left-hand side of  
event lozenge or with advantageously positioned "dots" on the right  
side.

I considered "striping" a divider line between the time-text and the  
event-title-text, but this wouldn't work for @time, multi-day, all- 
day, anytime-this-day and half-hour events that don't display time-text.

I also looked at having multiple "parallel vertical stripes", one for  
each calendar, but that didn't seem like a very scalable solution. It  
would quickly squeeze out the limited amount of space we have for the  
event title.

Below are a couple of visual studies. I've also tried a more  
saturated, "less girly" palette, but unfortunately the extra  
saturation makes it harder for the "alternate calendar colors" to  
show up.

Can anyone think of any other suggestions? What are the  
implementation challenges to such a design?

Mimi

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