I was going for something similar with 75% opaque at the top and 0% opaque at the bottom, known as a neutral density gradient in photography, often used in landscape photographs to balance the bright sky against the less bright ground or water. This is a great one for me since I'm color blind.
Yeah, it's mostly a "nature" gradient. Besides the sand the golden part also gets close to fallen leaves.
I used this gradient a lot of times when making websites in the past (before CSS was a thing, to give you an idea on how long it was), as it's colourful without being flashy.
I seriously love the over-the-top ice shaders used in all those early 2000s games. Ice always looked amazing, just this super bright white with pearlescent whitish-blue highlights that shimmered at odd angles and stuff. It's so cool.
Like the bridge tunnel in IceFields from HaloPC in 2003.
Or the almost-fully-transparent ice tunnel in Crysis Warhead (and firefall. Firefall had AMAZING ice shaders, it had some direction-based visual stuff going on where it had volumetric speckles all throuought the foot-thick ice).
Honestly: ice-themed anything looks cool to me, color-wise
oh, interesting - yeah, I try not to let the marketing dominate my associations, but tbh it's impossible to control that; blue does seem to be a corporate favorite.
I usually think about the time I spent at a kid looking at a cylindrical bulb that had a rainbow color spectrum, I loved the color and especially the blues.