Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_bear | Hacker News Reader

I've picked my fair share of colors for various businesses, and something that annoys me is that you pretty much always end up with green or blue being the main color.

I tried to figure out why, and I think it's a really dumb reason: like this article says, if you don't really know what you're doing with design, you want a spectrum of light-to-dark colors to choose from. Light green -> normal green -> dark green.

For some weird reason, we call light red "pink". And dark orange/yellow is "brown". If you pick one of those as your main color, it becomes much harder to just use lighter or darker shades without it becoming something else entirely. Great designers can make pink or brown work, but if you're a programmer who's just trying to find a "good enough" color scheme, it's way easier to go with green or blue.

I don't really have a good reason why we all think of pink as a different color from red, but we do.

View on HN

I think humans can see a wider range of blues and greens than they can yellows and reds. Check out: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/CI...

I believe this chart roughly corresponds to the colors humans can perceive for different light combinations. I see greens/blues in most of the chart and the colors I consider to be red, orange, or yellow occupy very small regions of the image.

Since greens/blues have a wider range, maybe that's why designers tend to use them as the main color?

Another factor to consider is our acuity varies across that color gamut (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAdam_ellipse). So we're best at distinguishing subtle differences in blues and worst at seeing variation of greens. The number of shades of blue or green you can see would be the number of MacAdam's ellipses which fit in each region - so it looks like we can see the most shades of blue but green isn't much of an outlier (depending on how you group pinks/purples etc.).

Most folks would disagree and say that blue is actually the least sensitive to changes and green the most, and allocate precision accordingly. See remarks here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_color

sorry I misspoke by saying shades - the MacAdam's ellipses are measured for the same brightness so only apply to variation in hue/saturation. So I think we can see more shades of green but more hues/saturations of blue?

Speaking of distinguishing subtle differences in blues, there is actually a linguistic component.

English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task using blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).

Source: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0701644104

This reminds me of the development of 'color words'. Most languages start off creating words to differentiate light from dark, followed by a word to describe red, then yellow (or green), followed by green (or yellow), then blue, then brown.

> For some weird reason, we call light red "pink".

This is partly cultural. In Russian, there's one word for light blue (голубое). It's the color used to describe the sky. I remember wondering why there's not an English equivalent, when there's the pink/red distinction.

The English word for the blue of the sky is "azure". Or sometimes "cerulean".

Thanks! But these words are certainly not part of the everyday vocabulary in English, like my Russian word example.

Native English speaker here (Canada) - I believe I can honestly say that I have never heard anyone refer to the colour of the sky as either of those things. Certainly never "cerulean", and I have strong doubts about "azure". In fact, because Microsoft Azure comes up in conversation relatively frequently, I have noticed that people don't even know how to pronounce it. I often hear people say "ah-zoor".

Violet, Indigo and Red are different hues. Pink is not "light red". No adjustment of the saturation of red will ever make it pink. Brown is created with a low saturation of red, orange, yellow or green.

Pink is a "light tint of red", not a different hue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_red

That is a purely semantic argument. It's also a contradictory one. That article says in the first sentence that they are considering adjusted hues as "shades" or "tints" of red. Using terminology beyond HSV only introduces semantic complexities to confuse the topic.

Wikipedia is a terrible source for this type of thing.

“Pink” was until recently a synonym for “light red”.

However, when it became possible and fashionable to produce more bright purple-red colors, these were also called “pink” (“hot pink”, etc.) by marketers, and now our late 20th/early 21st century concept of the denotation of the word “pink” is considerably broader than 50+ years ago.

Then how do monitors work with just 3 basic colors (RGB)?

Adjustment of Value will make a red pink though, not sure why you're talking about Saturation only?

> Pink is not "light red". No adjustment of the saturation of red will ever make it pink.

Can you tell us what you think one has to do with the other?

Pink is the hue between purple and red. You can't just saturate red, you also have to add a slight bit of blue.

This is pink: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53cdd3f3e4b09b69bef6e...

You can't adjust the saturation of that color to make it red, just a lighter shade of pink. There are pink colors that are closer to red than to purple, but pink is a different part of the color space than red is.

If you see the shade in that link as red or purple, then you're living in a hell of having no rational basis by which to talk about color, or possibly color-blind.

> living in a hell of having no rational basis by which to talk about color

That’s what many people on Hacker News are doing, apparently.

Hm? Did you mean to reply to me? I am not challenging or even talking about the definition of pink. That is happening elsewhere in this thread.

Huh. I always called that color magenta. And called light red pink. TIL.

Up until the last few decades, English speakers would not consider the color in your link to be “pink”. “Pink” was another word for “light red” (not the name of a hue), named after a flower that looks something like https://www.stauden-stade.de/img/artikel/full/823.jpg

“Hot pink” is a creation of the fashion industry / marketers from the 1980s (or maybe 70s?).

If you want to be unambiguous, you should call the hue of your link purplish red or similar. You could also use a word like fuchsia (named after a different flower) or magenta (a purplish red ink used in 4-color CMYK printing).

One reason is that computer displays are just not very good at reproducing colorful light reds, a limitation of the 3-primary emissive display technology. As a result light reds on typical computer displays are always pale/faded looking. This can make it hard to build a useful range of UI colors of red hue, depending on the needs of the UI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com