Flat UI Colors – Color palettes for use in projects, designs, presentations | Hacker News Reader

Flat UI Colors – Color palettes for use in projects, designs, presentations

flatuicolors.com

311 pointsfoxfired51 comments

I'm genuinely curious, what's the methodology behind categorizing palettes by country? Just for fun? Or is there something more interesting here.

I'm from the states, but I think I might like that Dutch palette more.

AFAIK The palettes are categorised by the nationality of the designer.

People from different cultural circles may have a different perception of some colors. This is probably the easiest to group by country.

Hello there, maker of Flat UI Colors here. I made collaboration with 13 designers from 13 different countries and palette names are given based on designer's country. The colors are not related with the country name or flag they are designer's own picks.

Oh cool. Well in that case I like the Dutch designer’s taste.

You should really make that clear on the site. It sorta comes off like you just sampled the flags or something, and what you actually did is WAY cooler.

This is fantastic.

What's going on with Adobe Kuler aka Adobe Color CC? Looks like they made it easier to grab the colors recently: https://color.adobe.com/explore/?filter=most-popular&time=mo...

It works easiest when you mouseover and click "Edit Copy" (second button)

Anyone remember Color Scheme Studio? https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/15962/color-schemer-studio

What happened to them? I can't find an official website. I could imagine people still wanting to buy their software today.

Kuler's pretty awesome still. I also use Paletton: http://paletton.com

I'd don't get it .. why are these palettes worth using above others? I'm not trying to be controversial .. I'm confused.

And that audio that is played when you select one... i dont get it.

You are questioning the UX while lwhi is questioning the utility of these palettes.

To answer your question anyway: it's fun.

Because they are the result of "Collaborating with 13 designers around the world" -- so, assuming they're competent in their jobs (which they look to be, judging from their individual profiles you get when you click on a palette), would be better than what some random dev will come up with.

Note that nobody says those are worth using "above others" (much less "above all others").

Just that those are well put together palette suggestions by professional designers.

(And I'm sure they used color theory in their selections, judging from 2-3 palettes I've examined).

Genuinely curious, as a non-designer, I don't understand what this offers over existing palettes websites [1]. Anyone care to enlighten?

[1] e.g. http://www.colourlovers.com/, http://www.color-hex.com/color-palettes/

Presumably the colors have been purposely picked to have really bad contrast, look identical to colorblind users, or create some other sort of usability difficulty.

I still use https://coolors.co.

The thing is no one ever uses one of these pallets. You start off with one maybe as a base and then adjust everything to get stuff just right. The Coolors UI seems to be good at that.

I love coolors. Just hit space bar to cycle. Once I see a color I like, I just lock that color and continue hitting space bar and locking colors till I have a full pallet :-)

This was very neat. What I'm about to say should not detract from that – this is probably one of the better palette tools I have used, if not the best.

But why on Earth would you want a user account and cloud storage for 15 bytes of colour values?

I think it's obvious that it doesn't offer anything different besides that it's another option than those sites. CL for example has palletes that aren't as easily copied and for the most part are used a lot inside their own system.

I like colourlovers.com as well. Feels more organic, less engineered. And those palettes are easier to use, since they are reduced down to a theme, rather than having a 20 color palette with no overarching theme.

That is just me speaking as a non-designer. It's much easier for me to say... go in and find a theme for Cinquo de Mayo in Color Lovers, then try to infer it from these flat palettes.

I recently built an internal tool at work, and in an attempt to make things very readable used the EGA colour palette.

It isn't pretty, but everything is obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter#Colo...

Wow, that's actually a really great idea. Takes you back to the days of simple 16 colors. It could even have that vintage Google UI look to it.

Good work. Perhaps https://www.colorion.co/ is a better option

Hmm, what if you need more than 5 colors? If I had to make a chart with 6 entities I would choose this one instead.

For 5-color palettes I would choose http://www.colourlovers.com

Cool ;)

Is the idea behind this that a UI uses different colors based on geolocation?

It looks like they use the flag colors to seed the palette.

What’s the association with countries? Is it just where designer is from?

What I'd like to see are each of the palettes used in context, e.g. as text color on white/black background or as a background highlight for black/white text. It's rare that I need an entire palette of colors outside this context.

What's the license?

I'd expect it to be either public domain or uncopyrightable.

Hopefully that's the case.

The country thing isn't just and simple because people from those countries submitted suggestions?

And it even asks about more suggestions, and will priorize suggestions from countries that aren't there already.

> https://medium.com/collect-ui-design-ui-ux-inspiration-blog/...

Honestly, if I was presented something like that site I would ask if they cheaply treat me as a kid. Colored flatness went too far, imo. Where is good old design, guys?

Good old design work has embraced flatness for ages -- literally, you can find flat design throughout the 20th century. It's also considered the more elegant by several design schools.

There's nothing about gradients, bezels, and such that makes them more "mature". If anything, it's the opposite (as flat can do away with often superfluous decorative stuff).

I really dig a couple of those palettes, but that website might be the most infuriating thing I have seen in a while. Unnecessary slide transitions. Product Hunt begging. Interrupting the back button (edit: or maybe interrupting a slide to a palette? I don't know, both are bad) with a beg for me to sign up for their newsletter. An interstitial added after they already interrupted me with an email beg--this one, a tweet-this beg.

Just...none of this is good. Stop. You came up with really nice, really neat color palettes. But now you made me think you're jerks. Stooooop.

The newsletter is actually triggered by heading to close button detection (there are scripts that detect fast movement towards the top of the page and display "wait a moment" popups), which I agree is one of the worst things that happen to the Web these days.

And that fancy transition (which I wouldn't mind actually) is even broken on Firefox - it ends sliding both in and out, and only then the page actually switches.

I opened it on Firefox Focus on iOS, and I just see a heading about 280 colors and a list of other products below. Looks like the main content has been blocked by the ad/script filters in the browser.

Using NoScript or turning off javascript fixes all the problems on that site. Although then it's just a blank white page without even so much as noscript text.

Hello there, maker of the website here. I'm sorry it made felt you that way, but so far it helped me to engage much more. PH Bar actually disappears after your first visit and subscription hook activates only once. Anyway, I've turned off PH bar and newsletter subscription hook :) Would be nice to hear how can I improve the experience here.

A worthy alternative: https://yeun.github.io/open-color/

http://colormind.io ("The AI powered color palette generator" - the image upload option is pretty nifty)

http://khroma.co/train/ ("The AI color tool for designers")

AI? Wouldn't they just automate regular colour theory?

Remember that most of the time, "AI" is a codeword for linear regression.

Two sides to this coin as well: I'm baffled that what was previously called linear algebra is now called "AI", but it has also emphasised to me how much I need to get better at linear algebra...

I came to the same conclusion, and actually picked up a stats book recently. The hype might be unbearable at times, but the underlying knowledge is also very valuable.

(I made colormind.io) Color theory isn't an exact science, you could make random palettes from various color rules but they don't look good (imo).

as an experiment, try this:

go on https://color.adobe.com and click on one of the color rules (it will give you a random palette based on the rule)

now compare with a palette from https://coolors.co/ or https://color.adobe.com/explore/ (user-uploaded)

if color theory + regression fully solved this problem, none of these color sites would need to exist.

HEY

I really liked colormind.io, and made a little toy Vue site when I was looking for a job (I grabbed your colors and pushed them to state so my website colors changed). See here: http://q8z8p.net/#/color. I just wanted to thank you because I think that was helpful in getting my first job!

awesome, that's exactly why I put up the api!

Thanks for the reply, I dove a bit more into it after making this comment and read some of the pages on your site discussing the process and practical application. Really interesting stuff and I appreciate the effort going into explaining it all. I guess I underestimated the depth of the problem space. Even while writing my comment I got to thinking about how colour theory would account for subjectivity and outlying pallettes that work well but don't have obvious relationships between vibrant colours.

That got me wondering if the process going on for colourmind could be turned into a new theory on colour. Is there a way to boil the process down into a deterministic one, or do you feel like the neural network is accomplishing something that couldn't be refined into a "rule" or guidline to use in a regular theory?

it's hard to say because GANs are still black boxes. There's a lot of research into explainable ANNs that gives some explanation as to how the NN arrived at a particular conclusion, so I think it should be possible in the future.

What’s next after this Flat UI trend? Textual UI?

I'm hoping that the next generation of designers mocks it as dated and embarrassing and embraces something ultra-baroque just to spite them.

It will be hilarious.

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