Show HN: Colors.lol – Overly descriptive color palettes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Colors.lol – Overly descriptive color palettes

colors.lol

388 pointspicdit51 comments

I can’t find the source now, but does anyone remember the collection of color names based on real things? It felt meaningful to remember the spectrum of colors that way (instead of arbitrary qualifiers), but now I can’t find it.

By any Chance: Werner's Nomenclature of Colours ?

Finally found my notes on it, and threw this quick page on it since the original website doesn’t seem to work:

https://observablehq.com/@shaunlebron/meaningful-color-names

I had not heard of Werner’s, but I like the idea of colors based on animal, floral, and mineral, thanks for the reference!

Awesome! You might consider using colors from Janelle's famous color names experiment[0].

[0] https://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs2LxVDcI -- part 2!

I've been using this resource: http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/ in naming CSS colour variables for years. It can often help with that gray-700/800/900 or gray-light/lighter/lightest issue where another colour needs to be added to the palette between existing values.

This great. I can't wait to see if I can sneak some of these names into my next project.

In the past I've used zeke's color-namer[0] package to nail down color names. But, anything that stops names like $color-bluish-white is a win.

[0]https://github.com/colorjs/color-namer

Not palettes, but for the authoritative "name" of a given color, I turn to the results of xkcd's color survey: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ and the list at https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/

This is big business.

Naming colours is a huge money spinning scheme.

Pantone has been given a monopoly because... Because no reason!

Forget open source as in beer software for the moment and let's write truly international canonical colour name reference.

I will get this going personally next month with anyone willing. I can support expenses and organise support and removal of all chores. I can ship the necessary tooling to participate. The project must he nonprofit by nature but I am fully equipped with the legal resources to trade donated time for real sweat equity first in line for being proportionally paid without affecting the nonprofit organ.

I love the idea of what you could achieve with the royalty income - what happens when the ODSS graphics programme worlf gets a no strings income and can be hiring and tooling the enterprise wetware necessary for the first rate conditions that only the big companies enjoy. Non profit charity organisations don't deprive their own people much anything. Sure enough for real is a helluva long shot but anyone? Shoot the breeze and scheme at least possible to collaborate via true accurate color rendition with a little bit of setting up I'm comfortable with. This is exactly the sort of thing that m6 late confounding partner wished our enterprise would be doing if our exit fell thru and his passing sure did (unnecessarily the route wasn't seen by a phalanx of attorneys highly motivated by closing fees. Ancient history now but I am speaking with genuinely passionate excitement at the fundamental principles and practice of the kind of business that is a strategic economic accelerator. I've decades of experience in media to lecture on why this is so crucial for business especially in the smaller business strata.

I think there’s a perfectly good reason for their nigh-monopoly: Pantone has been clawing their way to the top of the space of talking about color for a little under sixty years now, with a constantly-updated set of references that they managed to get into every commercial artist’s toolkit for a big part of that span of time.

That said a quick check suggests that the average corporate lifespan is anywhere from 20-60 years, depending on the list, so they may be ripe for disruption.

This is great stuff. I make video games and its some times hard to find what colors would go good with others. This is a nice collection I think.

Also, it looks like it would be great for deciding colors for a pitch deck/presentation. Good stuff.

Another good palette-hunting tool is Adobe Kuler.

It's interactive so you can lock down parameters you like and continue searching the possibility space

Apps like Kuler are IP territorial land grabs.

I'm so disappointed with the level of understanding of colof (and other widely used and tremendously important knowledge) that if anyone has a London home for opening a reference library I'd start by filling out a wall with the books. I long plotted opening a wework like office and furnishing the place with everything I need to return to business or try build anew bug can't afford to do simultaneously with buying the lease. You need professional lighting and environment for reading this kind of subject.

Awesome.

I like the color names, but am a bit disappointed there are multiple names for the same color, e.g. #000000 is 'divorced black' in one palette, and 'contributable black' in another.

I think you can see what colorblind people see with glasses, maybe I don't know if we all see the same colors or we take it for obvious because we all set it, what a fear, enter here to see how I see https://reason.com/2020/02/26/trump-campaign-files-libel-law...

Some of these palettes aren't accessible to the colorblind. For example, "gorgeous light lavender" and "endothermic neon blue" are identical to me.

They appear to be scraped from a twitter bot which generates the palettes semi-randomly, so this isn't terribly surprising:

https://twitter.com/colorschemez

I don't even recognize the adjectives used. Might as well be randomly generated.

I don't recognise the adjectives used in modern speech or even the papers. I suffered a massive memory loss rendering almost all of past ten years cut from my experience during my recovery. In the meantime language changed sufficiently to reduce me to a children's reading age.

Is there some piece of software that can change my screen to show me what a colorblind person would see? I know red/green is a no no for like 5% of people, but us there some way to do this systematically?

yes! in chrome dev tools https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1237393102635012101?

yes! in chrome dev tools https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1237393102635012101

Unfortunately, this uses a horribly inaccurate algorithm that's been floating around the internet for more than a decade [1]. It seems that the Firefox dev tools do the same thing [2]. As far as I'm concerned, this is worse than not having such a simulation at all, since it gives people a false sense of accommodating individuals with color vision deficiencies.

The Colorspacious Python library [3] does a proper job, using the algorithm of Machado et al. (2009) [4], which is what's considered state-of-the-art.

[1] https://github.com/MaPePeR/jsColorblindSimulator#the-colorma... [2] https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/tip/devtools... [3] https://colorspacious.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html... [4] https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2009.113

Thanks for taking the time to write this. I shared it with the team.

Thanks for passing this along. I also commented on the relevant Chromium issue [1] (as well as the relevant Firefox issue [2]). It should be a simple fix, since the transformation matrices just need to be updated.

Edit: I should have looked at the Chromium issue again today. It's already been fixed!

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100370... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1564993

Eizo provide a variety of tools with their displays:

https://www.eizo.com/products/coloredge/unicolor_pro/

I have a strong interest in learning more from you if you are as able ever to be a independent Guinea pig?

Above I have splurted aloud my sudden but not inconsistent desire to create a free for open source software color names reference and good color description should be mandatory for public information websites imnsho

More from NEC :

"Human color perception is very subjective and highly inconsistent. You can simply not trust your eyes "

https://www.necdisplay.com/colorcritical/home/aboutcolor

Good monitors have modes for some color blindness corrections. I'm extremely embarrassed by the paucity of my domain knowledge and you are right for calling out this need because color blindness is far more prevalent than generally accepted. We all don't possess any reference on our brains. More data enters the optic nerve pathway from out brains than from our eyes.

Lol, but I was a bit disappointed to find only the individual colours named. I was expecting to see overly pretentious names for the palettes themselves.

uninviting greyish green #82A67D cultrate bright light green #2DFE54 muttering dusty purple #825F87

#00000 fade to black on poetic combination descriptor

if the author(s) are reading this, the names seem to have gotten switched around on this one:

https://colors.lol/outward-

  outward-bound slate grey      #F19E8E
  unstatesmanlike reddish grey  #98756F
  cross-sectional blush         #58656D

the first and last names are swapped.

Nice catch (broken link though :) )

oh huh! not sure how that happened. here:

https://colors.lol/outward-bound

Didn’t know that lol was a tld but i did lol

Hilarious! A good friend is a color designer (selects palettes for major product lines) and she will love this.

It's called being Trade Dress artist of manager, or at least before the uncalibrated www came along, there was great need for the role and I will attest the importance of making it a separate job function with direct bottom line affect.

It feels so satisfying to be able to finally name these colors.

Is it different from https://www.colourlovers.com/ ?

Even aside from the color names, these color combinations are fantastic! Are they auto-generated?

"Lousy Watermelon"

Thanks for this laugh! :D

This is awesome. Bookmarked. Thank you

Thank you!

I took two of your colors, lol. :D hehe Thanks a lot!

This is super awesome. Thank you for making this!

great resource with a sense of humor. loving the "contributable black"

Those look like awesome purses

Love the clean UX. Obligatory reminder/request to add wide-color support for colors-focused apps/services (where it makes sense):