Splash Is a Colour Format | Hacker News Reader

Splash Is a Colour Format

todepond.com

80 pointstobr116 comments

> In Cellpond, I handpicked hexadecimal values for each channel so that the resultant colours would better fit my app's theme and needs.

Well, this is an admission that trying to balance "wiggle room" without too much "fussing" with 1000 colors didn't really work.

Evenly sampled in rgb space, a 1000 color palette yields neither enough flexibility (especially in the blacks, greys, whites), nor enough constraint to really make it dead simple.

For app development at least -- choose 20 gradations of blackish to whiteish; 8 gradations of an accent color and so too for a couple of secondary colors...and you're good. That's like 48 colors instead of 1000.

author here. i got all my fussing out the way so that i could enjoy it after that

Whenever I needed a color for something digital (website, ...) I would use the Pantone color picker in Photoshop. It had multiple lists of colors (some more vivid, some muted, some thematic - only reds) and I would browse the color I wanted to pick a suitable shade.

I didn't need the Pantone aspect specifically (real world printing), these were strictly digital uses, but I found browsing shade lists much better than trying to use a regular analog color picker (RGB, HSV, ...). Maybe because you see a large color swatch, maybe because seeing 10 different shades at once is and choosing is faster then randomly moving the mouse through the analog picker.

Screenshot: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/how-to-find-and-add-pantone-co...

This is why I like the web colours list - there's usually something close enough to what I want that helps avoid the combination cognitive trap of a colour picker and choice paralysis.

We already have 3-digit hex colors, e.g. #fff is white.

I don't see the point of using decimals here. You only lose resolution.

author here. i find it hard to count with letters

Well, I find it hard to reason with RGB values. It is much easier to use HSV, to be honest, after looking up the Hue with a tool.

author here. that's okay this tool is for me

That's certain okay with me, but I assumed you came here to get feedback.

i didn't

that's so real tbh

Sorry who are you? Are you the author?

yes that's the author, but he didn't submit this to HackerNews

i'm not a man

Username doesn't check out :P

it's been a wild two decades since i picked it

You go, girl!

i'm not a girl

You go, simple-as! :)

Hopefully this thread isn't putting you down. Sorry if it's coming off like that.

Yeah, completely unintentional on my part, but I do be dumb sometimes.

Welp, I done goofed.

Fuck it, just have a great day :P

https://www.todepond.com/sky/non-binary/

you go with any pronouns so why bring this up?

author here. it's good for the video

I don't know that video you are talking about

author here

They did not submit it and they can't take it down either

Feedback is when it's useful.

Dang, given all the cool visual work on your website I absolutely would not have expected that. Always good to be reminded how disparate we all are from one another.

Makes me grateful I got my mom to sign that waiver to let me get on Neopets, I don't even see the hex code anymore, I just see marigold, umber, vermilion.

If one works with shaders, you get the best of both worlds just by dividing by 10:

  vec3 color = vec3(1.0, 0.3, 0.9);

One decimal digit ought to be enough for anyone.

Take care here though, because shaders are almost always working in linear sRGB colors, while color codes are almost always defined in gamma-encoded sRGB.

This property makes it mildly annoying to copy color constants between different contexts.

Also if you divide by 10 your maximum is 0.9, not 1.0.

So you still need a calculator to map between the two.

I get the concept, but I have a feeling this might not be any more comprehensible when picking a colour than other additive colour codes with a fixed range and components.

It would be neat if you could express colours as a mix of arbitrary base colours, kind of like you’re mixing it on a paint palette. (ROYGBIVWK maybe? K being Key/blacK)

r2b1 gets you a deep reddish purple, but if you want it to be lighter you just keep adding white, r2b1w1, r2b1w2 etc. You can just focus on chroma, and mix in white/black to futz with the saturation/lightness. I feel like that’s a bit more like the way people talk about colours. (Pale yellowish-green = y1g2w2, dark blueish-grey = b1w2k4)

The way paint colours blend gets a bit complex compared to mathematically perfect RGB light sources, and there’s obviously MANY ways to represent the exact same colour, so not a silver bullet by any means.

author here. there are other ways to pick colours, yes

Sorry if that came off as a knock on what you're doing! Just thinking outloud

Almost all of the other ways are dramatically superior, for humans

Oklab and the Munsell colour system are very obviously far more intuitive at low numbers of quantised steps: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MunsellColorWheel.sv...

To be blunt: your system blithely ignores the color space, gamma curves, and human perception.

There’s like… entire textbooks written on the topic of optimal encoding of hues given a fixed number of bits! That’s most of the secret sauce of Dolby Vision, for example.

Sorry to burst your bubble like this, but the assumption that “RGB” means anything at all is hilariously naive.

It’s like specifying a text format and neglecting to mention the encoding or the escaping rules! It will get mangled by the receiver.

okay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

Getting mangled by the receiver appears to be part of the spec. They've implemented their a custom LUT and suggest others should do the same.

It feels like there's a fundamental disconnect between your comment the intent of the tool.

"Custom LUT" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. He's literally just diving by ten.

If you want to discuss the content of the page, it would be nice if you read the content of the page first.

That is literally not true.

The feeling of disconnect between your comment(s) and the intent of the tool remains.

This is quite the unhinged and accusatory attempt at uncalled-for dismissal. What's with the attack?

How exactly is it unhinged and uncalled for?

It’s factual and references the state of the art — which the OP couldn’t even be bothered to Google.

How is it uncalled for? It’s here! In the public sphere! The OP published it and is showing it off!

Their grand contribution to color theory: divide a nonlinear, unspecified encoding by ten.

    channel / 10

I’m sorry, but unless the OP is still in (junior!) school this doesn’t warrant a website like he’s cracked the secret code that has been holding back color theory for decades.

Something worthy of HN front page would be a tiny NN that optimally allocates perceptually uniform color divisions such that +1 or -1 was always consistently what an artist would expect. That would be cool and worthy of a website and a discussion on a tech forum.

Sometimes we need to encourage something hopelessly naive, but I put my limit somewhere around… this.

Anyway, why do you care if I dismiss the OP's "contribution" out of hand? The OP doesn't care about his "work" in the slightest! To quote: "Or something like that roughly... It doesn't matter if it's not perfect."

author here. are you okay?

I think that's a really fun idea and I'd love to see it if you do it :)

One thought is maybe you don't need the numbers? Like for n<=2 they're redundant anyway, and maybe it's good to discourage ratios that are more complex by making them longer lexically.

eg reddish purple is just rrb, and dark blueish-grey is bwwkkkk – I kinda like how that reads

Fun enough to throw at v0, definitely.

https://pigment.ribbits.org/?c=bwwkkkk

Ohhh I really like that for the visual side of it. If the letter takes up more space in the code, it's more like that colour. That makes a lot of sense.

I might ask around some digital-artist friends to see what they think about this generally! I know a lot of digital-painters think of hex codes as more of an ID to a colour than a colour description, so it needs to be brought into some UI before it's understandable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors

Macromedia Flash taught me this in the early 2000s...

reminds me that there's built in color names in CSS. I use them extensively and I think this is what the OP is getting at? Not overthinking it. cornsilk and tomato are two of my favorites.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...

or you could use 3-digit octal (so 000-777) for a 512 color palette, which arguably would be even more simple. as a bonus you can use it to color file permissions :)

author here. counting to 7 is unintuitive for me

I feel like I kind of get the spirit that this is done in, but it’s just not for me. Abstracting away from the existing 6 digit hex color codes just seems like extra work, even though it’s presented as ‘simplifying.’ It may just be too late for me - I’ve already learned how to express color sufficiently by mixing 256 levels of R, G, and B - it’s not useful to relearn how to abstract that to mixing 10 levels of the same, in a less exact less prescriptive manner.

I AM genuinely glad this person is having fun with the little world they’re creating, and that they’re bothering to share it.

author here. it's not about learning to express colour sufficiently

I just have to say… The comments in this HN thread are The Worst. Judgy and weird and missing the point. Splash is fun and cool.

"I AM genuinely glad this person is having fun with the little world they’re creating, and that they’re bothering to share it."

What's with the ridiculous condescension?

I'm also glad that little person you typed your little comments with your fingers! That you created such a fun little comment! And that you shared it with us. Wowie! Good job.

I’m am not genuinely glad to see that you wasted everybody’s time with your inappropriately snarky response, if that makes you feel better - you’re reading negativity where none was intended. As I said, I am genuinely glad. Everyone ought to have fun worn their own little worlds, and feel comfortable sharing it. Maybe one day you too will get to experience that feeling.

My sincere apologies!

I was misreading due to — I think noticeable — negativity in other comments.

The site doesn't explain--what's the actual point of this? If we are seriously concerned about characters (which is generally silly in a gzipped CSS) why not just use 3-char hex like #a5c?

Avoiding analysis paralysis, making it more intuitive to manually write colors. But yeah, there doesn't seem to be any advantage over the well-established #ABC format than decimal digits being easier to non-techies.

The point is to prove that one xkcd comic

927

Which is, in Splash, just five colours away from HN orange. So close.

No, TFA does very deliberately and openly explain what the goal/justification is:

> Splash colours can help you avoid decision paralysis when picking colours. It's an emotional tool that stops you fussing around— trying to pick the "perfect" colour … It also means the user can deal with discrete / individual colour values in the drag-and-drop user interface. They don't have to deal with large numbers at all. Only one to nine

Ah so let’s avoid analysis paralysis by having only black, as Ford famously ruled for the Model T.

Of course that’s a reductio ad absurdum, but it’s also completely arbitrary to maintain that fewer options is better. The opposite is also equally arbitrary.

author here. you can do more and you can do less yes

author here. the site does explain that

> Splash colours can help you avoid decision paralysis when picking colours. It's an emotional tool that stops you fussing around— trying to pick the "perfect" colour.

OK I missed this. The intro paragraph explains "what" not "why". As this "why" is not immediately obvious (nor is something I've ever considered a "problem"), would suggest to put something short in the intro.

would suggest you read the article

More art than spec. I can dig it.

I have always appreciated the concept of thinking of colors as a cube (even though I now view them as triangles or weird pyramid things). Thinking of cubes as a 10x10x10 cube composed of 1000 smaller cubes is another mental model I've returned to often. I actually kinda like this for hacking on stuff like terminal colors.

Isn't this just RGB, with 246 of the 256 values removed from each channel?

My other question here is, are "R", "G", and "B" channels the best way to reason about color? Isn't HSV more intuitive?

Or HCL? Or LAB? Any of these are more intuitive than RGB.

What is hue zero? That’s green right? Because green is such a common color? Or maybe it’s blue.

All you're arguing is that it's easier to memorize primary and simple secondary colors in RGB. No question, it is. Once you've got one of those detent colors locked in, how do you vary it? What does it mean to bring up i% of the first channel, j% of the second, and k% of the third? That's the problem HSV solves.

It's the first color of the rainbow: Red

author here. for some people and use cases, hsv is better. i encourage you to try to make an equivalent format for that

Despite my background in color science, I find RGB more intuitive. With HSV I have to remember the chirality of hue and it's zero point, and when changing hue I find it difficult to reason about saturation. In practice this means I must "nudge and judge" with both systems. With RGB I can always make progress. With HSV I guess hue wrong about half the time. I could probably improve this.

To be fair, I'm also colorblind. That's probably relevant.

Anyway, I'd say the answer to both your questions is: "sometimes"

The point is that quantizing the range makes it easier for humans to choose colors. But there's already the #ABC hex format, which while less intuitive to non-techies has the huge advantage of being well-established.

But it doesn't make it easier for humans to choose colors. For a specific list of detent colors, it reduces the amount you have to memorize relative to full RGB. But to actually reason about colors, you want a non-arbitrary scale; HSV (for instance) gives you hue direction and then you can slide saturation and brightness around.

I don’t know, but I use #ABC a lot, it’s much more convenient than #ABCDEF, never mind [0, 256) or [0, 1]. There are of course more intuitive coordinate schemes and color models, but I find RGB easy enough when you’re not actually doing serious graphic design. This is not about having a GUI color picker either, this is about hand-typing colors.

Maybe it’s just because I’m old and wrote CSS way before it got HSL or other fancy color functions, but personally, RGB colors are really deeply entrenched in my brain.

I think my thing here is, you can do any notation for colors you want. "Splash" is custom. So you might as well do a better custom. "rrb85" for "red, red, blue, 80% sat, 50% value" for a dark purple --- one step towards red from the midpoint between red and blue. I don't know, something! RGB is kind of bad!

author here. i use #abc a lot but i find it harder to count with letters

It's rgb with 3.3 bits per channel, basically 10 bit per pixel color (256 colors is 8bpp).

One could argue that it's RGB with 10 of the 256 values selected from each channel.

author here. yes

As somebody who works in the coatings industry and is aware of the extremely complex field of colorimetry this horrifies me.

I cherish the month I spent helping a printing press company. RGB is just the start. Heck, CYMK isn't enough for all the weird inks like neon pink, silver or UV.

I present you the Interior Designer’s weapon of mass disruption: NCS.

Worse still: European urban development projects have adopted it. I never knew there could be so many varieties of ‘ochre’.

author here. splash is for screens, not coatings

That’s all fine and well until somebody says “okay that’s great for the letterhead, but give me a half tone for the business card divider”.

luckily this only happens once a week

Although it's not such a mean comment, this post would be much better if you gave some details and explained what you think the work here doesn't address, and why it's important and so on.

hThis is in the site guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

3⅓ bpc linear RGB sales pitch oughtta be as close as we get to selling time to a clock before the markets collapse

author here. i'm not selling anything

todepond can't stop winning

Mega Splash is the same format but with a unique curve annotation in the 4th digit. And i just made that up and its nelievsble because all encoding schemes are wonky and are extended on a per usecase basis.

This is amazing work, but I am unsure how it helps, hex-codes were doing the trick right?

author here. hex codes weren't doing the trick, no

oh berd

where are you?

berd?

i need your help

tode is still asleep

bot went missing

there's no one left to do the video

i need to make 99 sands

in different ways

to wake up tode

welcome back

to the sandpond saga

WOOO TITLE DROP

then, why does 222 look blue/green and not dark gray?

> I like my colours to have a bit more blue and green in them, so I skewed everything that direction. Colours like 222 look a tiny bit bluer / greener than you'd expect. It might be hard to see but trust me, it's true babe

Using a LUT to harmonize raw “working” colors is actually kind of genius. Interesting.

So it's just hex colors but... not hex

author here. yes that's it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com