For example, I can tell just by looking at it that the HN banner is orange (hue: ~30), fully saturated (sat: ~100%), and neither light nor dark (l: ~50%).
The figures are also easier to fiddle with. Something is too saturated? Decrease saturation. Too bright? Decrease brightness. etc. With an rgb value it's very hard to fiddle with meaningfully.
For fiddling with colors, I recommend the HCL model (Hue/Chroma/Lightness), which is basically the same idea as HSL except your intuitions actually work: the perceived "grayness" (saturation) and the perceived brightness of colors can be adjusted independently (almost—I'll get to this) from each other and from the hue: http://vis4.net/blog/posts/avoid-equidistant-hsv-colors/
There are downsides, of course, which can all be traced back to one root problem with HCL: it's determined by biology, not physics. This means that any implementation is only going to be an approximation, which is the "almost" I mentioned above: when you muck around with chroma and hue, you'll still see small variations in brightness. This also means that the boundaries of this color space don't form a cube like RGB, nor a cylinder or double-cone like HSL and HSV. Those spaces form super nice shapes because you can physically choose 256 values for each of the 3 components of a pixel (the RGB cube), and the others are straightforward transformations of thereof. But they have no straightforward relationship to perceived brightness nor perceived "grayness". For the same reason, there's no native support for manipulating HCL colors in browsers, and I believe it's not great on other platforms either.
At least with RGB, I can imagine what the mix would be.
0° red
60° yellow
120° green
180° cyan
240° blue
300° magenta
Labelled colour wheel:
http://codropspz.tympanus.netdna-cdn.com/codrops/wp-content/...
Tangential, but does anyone else see movement near center of the color wheel when changing focus away from it? Optical illusions fascinate me. Are certain types categorized?
>3 Explanation of cognitive illusions > 3.1 Perceptual organization > 3.2 Depth and motion perception > 3.3 Color and brightness constancies > 3.4 Object > 3.5 Future perception
How much time have you spent fiddling with RGB values to pick colors? I assume it's either a lot less or a lot more than me, because while I too can certainly imagine what any given mix would be, my imagination is usually so far off from the real result as to be useless.
This has been true even when I worked in pure gray. 50% each of R, G, and B results in a perceptually very dark gray (that is, the contrast between #808080 and pure black, #000, is much less than the contrast between #808080 and pure white, #fff).
Elsewhere in this thread I sang the praises of HCL, a color model where you can adjust independently the hue ("color" in the traditional sense, as in orange vs blue vs yellow vs green vs red), the perceived brightness, and the perceived "grayness" (saturation) of a color: http://vis4.net/blog/posts/avoid-equidistant-hsv-colors/
So, regardless of whether or not you know the exact hue value of a given color, it still decomposes more easily than RGB :)
With HSL you'll have to basically memorize only the colorwheel which is not that hard. Lightness and saturation are then straightforward.