LOL Colors: Curated Color Palettes | Hacker News Reader

LOL Colors: Curated Color Palettes

lolcolors.com

125 pointsbrianjking42 comments

Highly recommended: the Adobe Color website (before Kuler): https://color.adobe.com/explore/most-popular/?time=all

Also the mobile app is extremely well done (can create color schemes from picture or live from the camera)

That is awesome! I can't believe I haven't seen it before.

The API is undocumented and restricted it seems, but I did manage to get the first 5000 or so color palettes before my browser crashed:

http://pasted.co/38096f65

how did you do this?

I inserted some JS code via the console that scrolls to the bottom of the page whenever the 'collection-assets' div changed, waited, ran observer.disconnect() as my browser was crashing to a halt, and then saved the HTML and combed through it with regexes.

    var target = document.querySelector('.collection-assets');

    var observer = new MutationObserver(function() {
      window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);
    });

    var config = { childList: true };

    observer.observe(target, config);

The API just returns JSON; paging through that is much cleaner than hooking into events and parsing HTML with regex.

https://color.adobe.com/api/v2/themes?filter=public&startInd...

Right, I tried that first but I couldn't actually get it to return any data. I think I was screwing up the request headers. Now though I remembered the Firebug "copy as cURL" thing and it's working, so yeah, definitely a better way to do it.

If you're interested in this kind of API, http://www.colr.org has one too.

Cool! Yeah, I like having enormous lists of color palettes for doing algorithmic art. I will definitely hit up the colr API and the colourlovers one posted above too.

In a similar vein I'd recommend ColourLovers[1]. Been using them for I think close to a decade for color, palette, pattern and general design inspiration.

Comparable to Kuler you can browse[2] or search[3] their palettes.

[1]: http://www.colourlovers.com/

[2]: http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes

[3]: http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/search

nice one, didn't know that

I have a habit of collecting sites like this.

Some others:

http://colorblendy.com/

https://coolors.co/browser

http://flatuicolors.com/

http://www.flatuicolorpicker.com/

This triggers me. Besides having no explanation whatsoever, none of these palettes are usable for similar roles. So if you are able to pick a palette that suits your needs, it means you are able to understand what you need from your palette. If it's the case, it is highly likely that you can generate a better palette yourself.

Do a quick test: take a screenshot of the site, then completely desaturate the image. The values are all over the place, which means you can't use any of these interchangeably.

In my latex template, there are lines like: \definecolor{Main}{RGB}{20,189,189}, secondary and so on. So the rest of the template use the main color, the secondary, the accented one, etc, and by just changing the lines by another palette built around the same principles you get another look completely for free.

Funnily enough, as far as I've ever been able to tell, the phrase "LOL colours" would mean "these colours are stupid".

(Of course, as I no longer 14 years old, who can say for sure that I've inferred correctly? And I couldn't figure out the right search terms for urbandictionary, which is ordinarily helpful for this sort of question. But I imagine it's somewhat related to this: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lol+theory)

Based on the name I assumed (before visiting) the site to be some form of satire. After visiting it, I am not sure. Could be, could also be serious.

So are you saying that the secondary, accented, etc. values are generated in your program as a function of the main color?

I don't generate the palettes algorithmically[0], but each color is defined by its role. So if you want change the palette, for another one where the values are in roughly the same relation, it is going to work.

[0]If you want to do it, there are ways to make it work, but you'll likely spend some time tweaking the algorithm and use another color space than HSV. The issue is that HSV does not map linearly to perception, so naive functions do not map very well across the full circle of hues. So basically it's quicker to do it by hand, unless you need to generate tons of palettes (like for a video-game).

This seems like a fun project and it is inspiring that the author challenged himself to make it, it's very commendable and something I was planning on doing myself when I get some free time.

What follows is a tangentially related rant, so feel free to skip it if you don't care about WordPress.

I watched the video[vid] and I was shocked when he got to he WordPress-vs-Rails debate. I'll ignore the fact that both of these are arguably overkill for this and also might have slowed down the development, because the overhead of both is pretty big for such a small project.

Putting that aside though, I'd like to address how WordPress has become abused over the year. People use WordPress for so many things that they shouldn't.

WordPress is great for being a blogging engine, or maybe even a news portal, but its oriented towards textual content, and it excels at that like no other engine out there; its in its name, even—WordPress! However, I've seen so many websites built in WordPress that don't actually use this feature: restaurants, apartment rentals and hotels, web shops, comics[comic], galleries, company websites (with no new/updates/blog section at all, it's literally a static website), etc.

There's a plethora of plugins for it too, which would be good, except people use these plugins to create websites with 0 posts, and everything on the WordPress site is made by that plugin. What is worse, often time these plugins don't work too well to begin with, but that's not even relevant. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a plugin for controlling an alien thermonuclear reactor somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy in Sirius's solar system.

[vid]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DexyfHomC4Q

[comic]: Although, even though comics are mostly graphic contents, they are relatively often updated content, so it isn't as bad as all the other examples I encountered.

WordPress is one of the easiest-to-use CMSs out there and has changed over the years to be much more than a blogging engine. It's not abuse, it's intended by Automatic because they've modified core to support these features.

I agree that WP has certainly made it easier to do these kinds of things, but I still think it's a classic case of using the wrong tool for the wrong job. There is a whole lot of different "eco system" of features in there that you don't use. What is worse, these unused features (or plugins that add multiple features) that you don't care about are potential attack vectors, but I've made this off-topic enough. So, I'll drop it.

Interesting — What would you suggest using for comics though?

Sadly, I don't know of any alternatives, short of coming up with a custom solution.

I tend to like Jekyll for this type of thing, even though Jekyll isn't ideal either, because it also seems to be primarily oriented towards blogging or textual content. However it would be easy to create a comic-type post and a text-based posts template or separate the blog content completely from the main/comic content (which isn't "posts" anyway); you can do the same in WordPress, but it does require more hacking and wouldn't feel as "natural," IMO.

The plug-ins. These have cost businesses a lot of money. I used to provide training for really highly customized WordPress sites and can still recall former DBAs wondering out loud why the vendor couldn't provide a simpler solution. "Because you aren't important enough to them" was really the only answer that would have made sense.

Simple colour harmonies can be picked from a hue circle using rules of various polygons. Why not just spin around with that until you find something that suits your application? Then you can tweak it as needed rather then using some predefined palettes.

Related: Built a tool for switching between hex and Munsell notation for OSX, https://github.com/germ/munsellScript

When picking colors I usually find some inspiration, then take a screen-shot and pick the colors off it using this tool: http://webtigerteam.com/colorpicker/

Awesome! For the colorblind engineer, this is so helpful.

I like the site but for usability, I would prefer to see all of the hex values for a given palette at once instead of hovering over each color individually.

Would be nice if one could choose a palette, apply it to the LOL emoticon and save the result

A small quirk/usability issue that I noticed was regarding how the favs/hearts/likes feature works. I just clicked the top one and the counter increments but there's no indication that I liked it and there's no way for me to deselect/unlike it. It looks like I can keep incrementing it.

They kinda look like some type of dildo/buttplug. Just saying... :)

Show HN is for stuff you make yourself. This was made by Mackenzie Child: https://mackenziechild.me

Not to be confused with MacKenzie-Childs :) http://www.mackenzie-childs.com/

Sorry! I just wanted to share with everyone, found on producthunt today!

It's okay, Mackenzie is definitely happy that you shared this.

Exactly right. Thanks for sharing that information.

We took "Show HN" out of the title on this one.

Thanks, sorry for the mixup!

I prefer ROFL colors.

Don't forget the LMAO ones.

Well, everyone knows, OMG colors are the 'in' thing now ...

That's funny. Why the downvotes?

There's a tendency to downvote comments that are not useful, to avoid comment threads to degenerate into a flood of snarky fourteen years-old debates. A tendency that I deplore.

Also, this comment is seriously unfunny.

Because this is not Reddit. And it wasn't really funny.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com