That intense orange is mostly suitable for small things (like selections, underlines).
It’s very flashy and it’s OK for kids, but for an employee who works 8 hours with Nautilus in full screen (and with many folders) it is the predominant color on the entire screen and it is really hard to look at for a long time.
This particular icon should have a more neutral color, maybe something similar to Adwaita’s folder icon.
We can discuss it here, but you should file a bug if you want feedback from the developer (although I doubt that he will change the color palette at this point). An easier option would be to just change the icon theme.
Now that @jaggers has made beautiful new icons, the folder icon needs a bit of attention.
I think the orange folder icon should be changed with a more softer color, something similar to the Adwaita folder icon.
I suggest using the color of the current Nautilus icon (beige) as the color of the folders and maybe have the orange one as the Nautilus icon.
Think about the business customers who spend a lot of time in Nautilus. How can they look at an orange screen for hours?
The folder color needs to be chosen carefully because it can be the predominant color of the screen (in full screen).
Suru was replaced by Yaru but the orange color still remains.
I cannot edit the title anymore to refer to Yaru so if a moderator sees this, please change the title word Suru to Yaru.
I am not sure if I should open a bug in Launchpad since all the theme refresh discussions take place here.
@dalaa The solution is easier than you think!
First thing, Night Light Mode would be an awesome idea to help your eyes. Second thing, is that if you don’t like the theme, you can download new ones. Everyone likes Numix, and if you don’t like orange using folder-color you can change that.
Keep in mind you can also switch with gnome-tweak-tool the background color of nautilus, to Yaru-dark like me.
If you are saying that you just want Yaru folder icons to be a different color, you can go to /usr/share/icons, copy the Yaru theme, paste it with whatever you want it to be, and modify files and things that will make it visible. Then you can modify the pictures by doing things like HSL and Black/White flip.
Hope this helps!
Have you heard of Suru++? And how to change folder colours? Suru never grew, but some others created more Surus few years ago, much before Yaru.
If you want the your Yaru folder colour (and hue…) changed, you can do it yourself with Inkscape, keep the result as svg or turn to png format. “Yaru” colour will not be changed – there is no will for that, probably. It is only just folder colours, the rest, apps and all can be anything.
Apart from a user being able to tweak a theme, I think it would be worth to discuss whether such a strong orange colour is a good default for the theme. In my opinion, it would be better to be less intense, but it would be nice if someone from the theme group, like @madsrh, @frederik-f , could comment further on this. 
Also, I see @madsrh linked to Sam’s repo, instead of Ubuntu’s one. Are you still contributing back this kind of stuff? Otherwise I would send a bug on Ubuntu’s Yaru repo. 
We discontinued the work with the Suru repo and instead had the luck of meeting jaggers who basically overhauled the whole icon theme 
I am also not the biggest fan of the orange folders and could imagine this one as the base color:
But the double orange of the orange selection upon the orange folders can be reduced (and is reduced in bionic) to the label only:
To be fair, that link is over one year old. As @frederik-f mentioned we forked Suru since then 
I’m not a fan of the white-ish suggestion:
I think that the current tone is a bit harsh too.
But it is very much with style with the Humanity icons with the dark orange:
Could we tone it down a bit like this perhaps? 
Ah thanks for the white mock-up. Sometimes that is very important to see that your (in this case my) idea is crap xD
Yeah toning it down would help a lot imho!
I agree the orange is a bit much, especially when icons are selected and the window is in focus
It’s possible that the colours were originally chosen on a machine with a poor colour gamut. And so it is possible the authors of such colours weren’t aware of how intense their colours really were.
So I guess what I’m saying is just a reminder for anyone involved in colour design to do so on a high quality display with reasonably wide gamut (say over 90% sRGB). Otherwise you can’t really see what you’re doing.
Certainly on the XPS 15 4k panel with a wide colour gamut, the orange is piercing.
Yes I have these orange piercing problems on my xps too. It is sometimes almost burning through the LCD (it looks like its burning)
We had a hot discussion for sidebar rows, too: https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru/pull/1303
Don’t kill the orange everywhere. It is a part of brand identity. I used to hate orange folders during my early Ubuntu days. But now I am used to it.
Yes, it appears the “piercing” orange is by design, and not unique to just the folder icons:
The same orange seems to be used on this page and nobody’s complaining about that yet. So it seems to be a contextual issue and I guess developers should just use the fully saturated orange more sparingly.
I honestly like the colors as it is right now in Disco.
