Should I require a student to acknowledge or change a color scheme from a common paper? When I wrote my first paper, I experimented a bit with different colour styles until I found one that was both clear and aesthetically pleasing. I’ve since used it for all papers where I was first author. One of these submissions has been with a master’s student, who is now writing up his thesis.

He used the colour definitions from the paper for the figures in his thesis, which slightly irks me. Partly it is because this makes it harder to see which figures are cited from the paper and which are his own, partly because I put some effort into it. Is this so minor I should just let it go?

Update: As Wrzlprmft pointed out, using a consistent color scheme within a thesis is important for readability. Since recommending to use something and then requiring acknowledgement would be weird, I let it go.
Unless I totally misunderstand what kind of colours we are talking about, your student did what I would consider best practice. Using a consistent colour scheme for all figures in a publication or presentation is a good thing for the following reasons:


It is aesthetically pleasing, in particular on posters and presentations.
If two plots have colour axis for the same variable or measure, it facilitates comparing them.
If colours encode the same things across plots (e.g., red is always species A, blue is always species B), it increases readability, as the reader does not always have to check the encoding for each figure.


This also holds across publications, if they are about the same topic.




  this makes it harder to see which figures are cited from the paper and which are his own


Citations should suffice to indicate this. You cannot rely on stylistic mismatches to detect images from other sources anyway.


  I put some effort into it


As Jakebeal already noted, developing a colour scheme is rarely a scientific achievement. And even if you consider it to be one, your student can cite it and reuse it. After all, being reused is what scientific results are for. Remember that many scientists use plotting and typesetting programs developed by other scientists.

An acknowledgement does not hurt though, but I would probably not be very insistent on it.