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I use coolors.co for my palette work but have had to use my intuition for button state shades horizontal rules and otherwise.

It would be great if there was a web app that was like coolers but faster, and presented actual UI examples with all of the advice from this piece automatically applied.

I'd build this if I didn't have my hands full!

I was just thinking the same thing! May also build something like this. This from cloudflare seems quite close to what i had in mind https://cloudflare.design/color/

This one looks good too https://material.io/resources/color/#!/?view.left=0&view.rig...

> The last bit is culture. Color in each culture is widely different.

One thing that confused me a great deal when I was younger: In the political system that I was familiar with, a "red" party is left-leaning. But in the United States, "red" is right-leaning.

Apparently, this convention is also extremely recent; only since the 2000 elections has red-is-Republican and blue-is-Democrat been agreed upon.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Con...

Republican and Democrat left/right leaning used to be swapped though https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-part...

I’ve been wondering if it is because of Americans’ phobia of socialism? Democrats don’t (generally) want to be seen as socialists, so they can’t embrace the red of the American flag more than the blue.

That's not a bad hypothesis, but then why pick the color most strongly associated with communism?

I don't think there was any real picking involved on the part of the parties... Election maps would use red and blue, but that was a very intermittent thing to look at (once every four years for most people; voter turnout in the US was abysmally low, and who knows how many voters actually watched the results with interest). And each network would kinda randomly assign them to each party, without even agreement over which is which from one network to another. And then it finally settled into consistency in 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Con...

Maybe I misunderstand your comment, but my point is they didn’t. Communism/socialism is red, and the US is blue+red. If the “left” side of US politics feel a need to distance themselves from socialism, they need to claim blue as their main color. No one is likely to mistake Republicans for communists so it’s safe for them to use red.

Another way to put the same argument is that Democrats are centrists/liberals rather than left wing/socialists, so the red used by actual left-wing parties in other countries just doesn’t fit.

Apologies, I meant to say why would Republicans pick red in that case, since they're even more anti-communist, but forgot to be specific enough in expressing that

> In India [red] represents purity.

Does it? There's a lot of subcultures here, so maybe - can someone from north India confirm if this is a thing there? Here in south India, there's no such association with purity I can think of. It generally represents danger and anger and such things similar to in the West.

Red cloth is commonly used in Pooja, and you put Red tika (and rice grains) on forhead. Brides traditionally wear predominantly red clothes for certain ceremonies during wedding. Red, Yellow/Amber, and White are quite common during rituals in North. Are they not in South India?

Sorry, missed this comment till now.

> Brides traditionally wear predominantly red clothes for certain ceremonies during wedding.

This isn't common in south India (to my knowledge).

> Red, Yellow/Amber, and White are quite common during rituals in North.

Yellow is the one that stands out to me, and has religious connotations of purity and sacredness, but not red. (White too does, but for non-religious reasons, including associations with Khaddar and with Dhotis.)

(From another response:)

> All Goddesses wear red colored clothes

In my region, the colours change every day (or in some similar regular interval), and red isn't significantly more prominently used than others.

I can see a sort of link made via the Kumkum/Tika/Tilaka from red to purity, but honestly that would be a stretch and a pretty unlikely association for someone to make when encountering the colour.

All Goddesses wear red colored clothes and normally wear Red "Tilaka" ( along with yellow and white sometimes ). It does symbolize purity in a way.

An Indian Bride also typically wears red clothes.

> There are certain things in life that should follow trends, many of which are items that convey important meaning. Can you imagine if every city in America used a different stop sign? It would be disastrous.

I think you just offered an argument against, not for, following trends. Stop signs are universally recognized not just because the same design is used everywhere, but because the design is stable over time.

>RGB simply does not map 1:1 with our biology.

Hate to be picky... but actually it maps rather well to our biology. After we, we see in RGB. what it does map to is our perception. HSL is good for artists as a ‘thinking space’.

The real problem is that in art literature most Colour spaces are expressed as 2 dimensions. So called harmony is discussed most as an attribute of hue, never of a compound of hue, sat and lightness.

One of the problems is that color perception is linear across RGB, so it's only a rough approximation of biology.

The RGB you'd typically use when designing or developing something does not really map very well to human biology because it's just an approximation that happens to work well with the technology we currently have.

For example, the dynamic range you can express with standard 24-bit hex RGB colors (e.g. #ff0000) is way smaller than what the human eye is capable of perceiving.

Also, using mathematical models to create palettes typically relies on a lot of assumptions. For example, #ff0000 is not perceived as equally bright as #00ff00 by a human being, yet looking at it represented like this you'd assume this to be the case.

I think it is possible to build a mathematical model that creates pleasing color palettes, it's just that they're often built on approximations that aren't really accurate.

RGB leaves out the opponent process, which explains the preschool primary colours red green yellow blue in a way that RGB cannot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process

> This is the first post I've seen on HN that actually captures how to properly set up your color palette.

This is just a Boostrap color palette that I see here and it would be nice if they'd been a bit more creative. Imagine if Rembrandt used Boostrap colors in all his paintings and all his peers copied him ... that would be a boring world, but alas, that's what the internet is currently like, and articles like these certainly don't help.

Depending on your brand, boring might be a good thing. You don't want a backend business/reporting tool or data viz solution to go "wild" with its color palette; you want things to be readable and distinct without looking horrible. For that type of software, guides like this are great.

I don't understand this criticism. The article isn't about a specific palette, but rather rules of thumb for building your own. The hues they use in the examples are pretty bland, but the advice isn't "use these colors", it's "here's how to create a palette using colors of your choice".

The criticism is that they shouldn't use a palette as an example that everybody already uses. Instead they should show how their rules can help us arrive at something interesting and new.

Wow. Choosing a color palette for a UI and choosing a color palette for a painting are two completely different bags. This should be obvious.