Colorbox by Lyft Design | Hacker News Reader

Colorbox by Lyft Design

colorbox.io

20 pointsLiriel10 comments

Discussed yesterday (different URL):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800718 (58 points, 9 comments)

Cute, but people need to stop using HSL and similar color models for this kind of thing. It is horrifically bad for it, designed by software researchers in the 1970s who had very slow computers and as far as I can tell little background in color vision, color reproduction, visual art, or graphic design, and then passed down through the generations with very little thought along the way.

A human being who is not already an expert should essentially never be looking at numerical values of “R”, “G”, “B” or these trivially derived quantities of “H”, “S”, “L”, “V”, etc. and trying to assign meaning to those numbers. It just results in confusion.

A visual color picker interface (with no numbers involved) is pretty much the only justifiable context where HSL or HSV ever makes sense. And arguably not there either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV#Disadvantages

people need to stop using HSL and similar color models for this kind of thing

What is your suggested alternative?

Munsell, NCS, OSA-UCS, CIELAB, CIECAM02, CAM16, ICtCp, Jzazbz, ....

Pretty much anything designed by color experts from the past 100 years would be better.

Here’s an implementation of CAM16 I was making today, https://observablehq.com/@jrus/cam16

Okay this is pretty neat. I tried to create an palette that doesn’t work well together but from what i have tried it seems almost impossible. I’m honestly amazed! Great work.

An interesting read regarding gradients and color palettes is the concept of perceptual uniformity.

1. http://www.hsluv.org/

2. https://programmingdesignsystems.com/color/perceptually-unif...

I am not a designer but can this thing help you pick colours for your UI if you give it start and end colours and number of steps (ie how many colours you want) ?

If you want to pick colors for your UI, you should first design in grayscale, then add color (while preserving the perceived lightness using a reasonable color model like CIELAB or CIECAM02 or ...).

This tool is likely to create confusion and yield poor results in the hands of someone who isn’t already an expert (either through studying human vision or long practice as a visual artist), because the numerical values sound important and technical, but in the HSL color model are actually rather arbitrary and unrelated to human vision.

Thanks for answering.

> This tool is likely to create confusion and yield poor results in the hands of someone who isn’t already an expert (either through studying human vision or long practice as a visual artist)

Where can I study human vision. Could you point me to some books/ resources ?

https://www.handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com