At the moment crafting is a very straightforward process: If you have the materials and the skills, you can craft everything in the game. This is a suggested format for increasing the complexity of the crafting system, as well as encourage a more lively economy in the future game.
The system I imagine works something like this:
You start with a regular crafted item. Example: Farmer's Jacket
Anyone can craft it. Now, you're making a couple to sell one day, just using up materials that you don't really need, trying to get some coin out of it, and one of the crafts comes out as: Red Farmer's Jacket
What's this? Different color. If they ever add bonus's to clothing, maybe it'll have a slightly different or variant bonus. Even if not, it's a unique item.
To make it interesting: Once the player has 'acidently' crafted a Red Farmer's Shirt, the recipe is now added to their crafting list. It would probably have additional or variant ingredients to keep it interesting. Maybe a rare red item to cause the color change?
The reason for having the recipe stay with the player, rather than just happen very rarely, is to encourage crafters to search for unlockable recipes. This will increase the demand for lower tier crafting materials in the long term, as well as provide a more complex economy. To maintain rarity of these variants, have each one be very very rare, with perhaps the chance of finding an unlockable recipe increase with.. higher proficiencies, higher humors-- basically, hidden requirements to discover them.
Keeping your crafting character alive becomes much more important (not that it's ever NOT important), but the chances of having that recipe again are very small, or the investment of time in trying to find that specific recipe makes it almost not worth it.
The number and manner of unlockable recipes should be fairly large, I think. Perhaps it's easier to find something like a color variant, for instance, and make even rarer unlockable recipes that change the shape of the object somewhat.
Foods could have variants with different ingredients, shifting the gluttony events slightly or maybe adding slight long-term buffs. Variant storage items could be very valuable to have in a town (if they add a tiny bit of extra space) and makes an individual crafter a specialized resource indeed.
As long as the variants don't throw the balance of the game significantly, I think this would make crafting more interesting over all. Imagine being paid by one player to kill another who has a special recipe. Industrial espionage!
I realize this would do away with the need for a specific 'dye' based customization system, but overall I think this would be more interesting. Players could have a much broader choice of unique appearances.. towns who have specialized clothing crafters could have a dress code, and while I'm not a programmer, I don't think adding this system would be too much of a stretch of the system already in place.
A possible alternative or secondary system I thought about was crafting stations that allow for 'randomized' results. Such as a potter's wheel. Add clay and water, work the clay on the wheel.. maybe you get a bowl, maybe a mug, maybe a plate, maybe a Easter Island Head?!?.. shapes could be consistent, but perhaps with a semi-randomized color scheme (or a way to influence the color via adding coloring agents to the wheel in the first place). This would allow decorative items that would give players a way to individualize their houses/properties/etc. Pottery is just one example, I can imagine variations for just about every type of craft. I think something of this variety would be better for build items over the above method for craft items.
Comments? Suggestions? Criticism? All welcome. Thank you for taking an interest. ^_^