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#color#here#colors#more#rgb#author#colours#colour#hex#maybe
Discussion (112 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Well, this is an admission that trying to balance "wiggle room" without too much "fussing" with 1000 colors didn't really work.
Evenly sampled in rgb space, a 1000 color palette yields neither enough flexibility (especially in the blacks, greys, whites), nor enough constraint to really make it dead simple.
For app development at least -- choose 20 gradations of blackish to whiteish; 8 gradations of an accent color and so too for a couple of secondary colors...and you're good. That's like 48 colors instead of 1000.
I don't see the point of using decimals here. You only lose resolution.
Makes me grateful I got my mom to sign that waiver to let me get on Neopets, I don't even see the hex code anymore, I just see marigold, umber, vermilion.
This property makes it mildly annoying to copy color constants between different contexts.
So you still need a calculator to map between the two.
I didn't need the Pantone aspect specifically (real world printing), these were strictly digital uses, but I found browsing shade lists much better than trying to use a regular analog color picker (RGB, HSV, ...). Maybe because you see a large color swatch, maybe because seeing 10 different shades at once is and choosing is faster then randomly moving the mouse through the analog picker.
Screenshot: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/how-to-find-and-add-pantone-co...
It would be neat if you could express colours as a mix of arbitrary base colours, kind of like you’re mixing it on a paint palette. (ROYGBIVWK maybe? K being Key/blacK)
r2b1 gets you a deep reddish purple, but if you want it to be lighter you just keep adding white, r2b1w1, r2b1w2 etc. You can just focus on chroma, and mix in white/black to futz with the saturation/lightness. I feel like that’s a bit more like the way people talk about colours. (Pale yellowish-green = y1g2w2, dark blueish-grey = b1w2k4)
The way paint colours blend gets a bit complex compared to mathematically perfect RGB light sources, and there’s obviously MANY ways to represent the exact same colour, so not a silver bullet by any means.
One thought is maybe you don't need the numbers? Like for n<=2 they're redundant anyway, and maybe it's good to discourage ratios that are more complex by making them longer lexically.
eg reddish purple is just rrb, and dark blueish-grey is bwwkkkk – I kinda like how that reads
I might ask around some digital-artist friends to see what they think about this generally! I know a lot of digital-painters think of hex codes as more of an ID to a colour than a colour description, so it needs to be brought into some UI before it's understandable.
https://pigment.ribbits.org/?c=bwwkkkk
Oklab and the Munsell colour system are very obviously far more intuitive at low numbers of quantised steps: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MunsellColorWheel.sv...
To be blunt: your system blithely ignores the color space, gamma curves, and human perception.
There’s like… entire textbooks written on the topic of optimal encoding of hues given a fixed number of bits! That’s most of the secret sauce of Dolby Vision, for example.
Sorry to burst your bubble like this, but the assumption that “RGB” means anything at all is hilariously naive.
It’s like specifying a text format and neglecting to mention the encoding or the escaping rules! It will get mangled by the receiver.
It feels like there's a fundamental disconnect between your comment the intent of the tool.
Macromedia Flash taught me this in the early 2000s...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
I AM genuinely glad this person is having fun with the little world they’re creating, and that they’re bothering to share it.
What's with the ridiculous condescension?
I'm also glad that little person you typed your little comments with your fingers! That you created such a fun little comment! And that you shared it with us. Wowie! Good job.
I was misreading due to — I think noticeable — negativity in other comments.
I have always appreciated the concept of thinking of colors as a cube (even though I now view them as triangles or weird pyramid things). Thinking of cubes as a 10x10x10 cube composed of 1000 smaller cubes is another mental model I've returned to often. I actually kinda like this for hacking on stuff like terminal colors.
> Splash colours can help you avoid decision paralysis when picking colours. It's an emotional tool that stops you fussing around— trying to pick the "perfect" colour … It also means the user can deal with discrete / individual colour values in the drag-and-drop user interface. They don't have to deal with large numbers at all. Only one to nine
Of course that’s a reductio ad absurdum, but it’s also completely arbitrary to maintain that fewer options is better. The opposite is also equally arbitrary.
OK I missed this. The intro paragraph explains "what" not "why". As this "why" is not immediately obvious (nor is something I've ever considered a "problem"), would suggest to put something short in the intro.
hThis is in the site guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Worse still: European urban development projects have adopted it. I never knew there could be so many varieties of ‘ochre’.
Maybe it’s just because I’m old and wrote CSS way before it got HSL or other fancy color functions, but personally, RGB colors are really deeply entrenched in my brain.
To be fair, I'm also colorblind. That's probably relevant.
Anyway, I'd say the answer to both your questions is: "sometimes"