Storied Colors – a catalogue of named colors

saltyoutburst•about 2 hours ago

For a word nerd exploration of how colours are defined in dictionaries, check out 'True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color' by Kory Stamper. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237693038-true-color

susiecambria•about 2 hours ago

Ooh, cool. Will check it out :-)

gchamonlive•about 1 hour ago

Does the background colour have a history too?

hiccuphippo•about 2 hours ago

There's no rebeccapurple.

bombcar•about 1 hour ago

We'll get it by Friday.

jmatan•about 1 hour ago

i do like the concept, though the blatantly claude-tinged "italicized word" visual language undermines the author's credibility w.r.t graphic design history imo

esikich•22 minutes ago

Who cares. As if every website needs to be meticulously hand crafted. You mad at people that use css templates too?

mm263•about 1 hour ago

Terrible AI prose

mmooss•about 3 hours ago

> Most of what you can read about historical color on the web has been rewritten three or four times from the same Wikipedia paragraph, with the citations dropped along the way. What you are reading here is an attempt to put the citations back.

That implies the entries also are based on the Wikipedia paragraph, though I think the author means they do their own research. The entries I looked at list several high-quality entries in a bibliography at the bottom but don't cite any of the text. Also, I don't know who wrote these - do they have any idea what they are talking about? Is this LLM output?

If anonymity ever worked (almost never in scholarship), it may not work anymore due to LLMs.

lekevicius•about 2 hours ago

> Known generative-AI crawlers are disallowed in robots.txt. This is a research catalogue assembled from primary sources; it is not training data, and a model fine-tuned on these paragraphs would launder out exactly the part — the citations — that gives the prose its value.

This reads like distaste for LLMs - but generally website reads (and is designed as!) very LLMy.

zetalyrae•about 2 hours ago

If the About page said who made it, i.e. if someone was putting their reputation on the line, I might be more receptive. But the website has enough LLM design tics to make me suspicious.

It's sad. I come to Hacker News to see cool stuff and when I click on a link and see something obviously put together by an LLM I feel like I've been tricked :(

mkprc•about 2 hours ago

Right?! It's a bummer when a nice-looking website is now a red flag. It's become part of my workflow now browsing the web to check the About/Contact page on a website immediately; if there's no real person behind the site, how can it be trusted?

susiecambria•about 2 hours ago

Apologies. Was taken with the names and stories. . . didn't read the about page. Guess my critical thinking was on the fritz. Seriously, learn a lot here and will try to do better.

egeozcan•about 1 hour ago

They may have used LLMs to design the site but IMHO the content is fine and well-sourced. Example: https://storiedcolors.com/color/blaze-orange/

Even if LLMs were used to help, someone must have spent a lot of time on making it read well. At least that's how it feels like.

stratts•about 1 hour ago

Except on that page there's immediately a claim that isn't backed up by any of the citations, eg:

"The hunting-safety effect has been substantial. The non-fatal hunting accident rate in the United States fell substantially over the decades following blaze-orange adoption, with state hunter-safety data consistently identifying the orange mandate as a major contributor to that decline."

None of the sources have any national hunting accident data - there's a single link to data from New York, and nothing that would support the claim that state data "consistently" identifies anything...

1f60c•about 2 hours ago

"One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison." is so Claude it hurts. :'D

Storied Colors – a catalogue of named colors

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