#FF4A00 | Hacker News Reader

#FF4A00

mikeknoop.com

76 pointsWadeF42 comments

Color is something that people take for granted or think of as trivial but it's actually rather complicated. There are some colors that can't be represented in print and some colors that can't be represented on a monitor. There are several different color spaces (RGB cube, L ＊a ＊b ＊, etc.) It doesn't help that CSS3 and HTML4 color modules are terrible (the darkest octant of the sRGB cube is empty and most of the colors are too saturated or and too light). [1]

[1]http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/Dictionaries#CSS3

EDIT: I used full width asterisks (U+FF0A) because I wanted to write L ＊a ＊b ＊ without inserting white space after regular asterisks (U+002A).

Hey Mike, that's pretty close to our color: #ff4f00.

Not random though, it's actually International Aerospace Orange (we're a flight company).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_orange

http://randomcolour.com/

My random color was #A7D6AE

http://www.colorhexa.com/a7d6ae

Not bad I presume... Maybe i should just do this from now on.

I've always wondered if the HN Topbar color option somehow influenced my subconscious...

I changed mine to match my editor text color (greenish).

According to "Name That Color", your color is (almost) "Moss Green". :)

http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#A7D6AE

They should have the color change on click, save some refreshes. It's using JavaScript anyway.

I had thought about that, and/or have it show information about the colour, but decided against it in the end as I really like the single purpose nature of it.

I've also always quite liked the thought of people loading the site for the first time and not being sure if it's finished loading as nothing appears but the background colour, so then refreshing to reload the site, only to see the colour change and realise that the site is exactly what it says it is.

How is it pronounced?

Is it Zah-pee-err, as in, more zappy?

Or is it Zah-pee-eh, like it's a fancy french service?

Or is it Zah-peer, like a fancy Frenchman pronouncing "the peer"?

We like to call ourselves "zap-ee-er" but I'll accept any pronunciation since that means you're talking about us!

Fun side note. We integrate with a lot of European and Australian companies. Most of the time on intro calls they default to the more "French" sounded version ”zap-ee-air” whereas most of the US companies seem to default to a more "English" pronunciation "zay-pee-er".

As a brit, my first reading was "zay-pee-er", like how "rapier" missile is pronounced.

Am I the only one pained that none of the favicon, the "KNOOP" title, the links on the right, or the article's hyperlinks matched #FF4A00, or even eachother, even before I saw it? :D :D

Nice eye. I think over time the color got subtly shifted by a few percentage points here and there. Nonetheless, the color you see today is directly influenced by that early random decision.

No, bugged me too. In fact, nothing on the entire page is actually #FF4A00. The big logo down the bottom is the more muted #ff6122, for example...

should have gone with #bada55

http://ni9e.com/bada55/bada55_can.jpg

I thought "Huh, that looks like Y Combinator Orange" and then had to use Chrome Inspector to see how close it was. (#ff6600 actually)

Pretty close to the X/Web color "Orange Red"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermilion_(color)#Orange-red

When I first learnt about orangered ten days ago, it felt like "too much was going on", but an experiment showed that slightly more than half of surveyed users prefer it over #CCCCFF.

Hey if any of you guys are ever around MO my team would love to meet you! We just moved to KC from Boston

I'm actually around Columbia, MO for the next month and half or so. We have a few employees in town, too. Care to make a trek to Mizzou?

sick we would love to! you can reach me at @mikedemarais

Currently in SEMO job hunting in STL and KCMO--if I make it to KCMO, I'll take you up on that!

Interesting. It reminds me of this campaign I was going to start called the Facebook 300 Diet. The goal was to remove all of the non-essential cruft friends from your Facebook account to clean up your network to the most essential 300 friends. I created criteria to help you determine which friends should be removed and which ones should stay. The color #FB300D.

I am Facebook underweight, then! I only have around 200.

I'm starving apparently, fewer than 50.

I probably wrote code to perform at least two dozen of these kinds of tasks for my last business and I'll probably be a customer for my next business. This definitely creates a lot of value for non-technical small businesses.

However, I'm not sure your landing page does a great job of communicating your product's value to non-technical people.

I think we can do a lot better too. It's a classic problem: how would you sell Excel if it were a web app?

Thanks for the reply, I hope you didn't think I was just being a naysayer. This seems like a critical problem for marketing, if you have two audiences and you're catering to the smaller one. If it were me (grain of salt) I would go all in on something like "Zapier gives your employees superpowers".

As the legend has it, Yahoo originally chose their purple and yellow colors because they were the cheapest paint colors in California back in 1995.

I've always been a big fan of #f90-- useful as a highlight / hard to miss on a web page, easy to remember and type.

I wonder if there are people who can visualize what a color will look like just by reading the hex value of it.

Plenty. I can do it, to a certain degree of accuracy. At least enough of a degree that there won't be a more accurate english word for the color in my vocabulary.

Am I misunderstanding? It's not that hard for a lot of colors. Grays, reds, blues, and greens are obviously the easiest.

Maybe not perfectly, but it's not all that hard to guess: 00 through FF, with each pair representing red, green, and blue channels respectively.

It helps to remember that: 1. #RRGGBB 2. B + G = Cyan 3. R + B = Magenta 4. R + G = Yellow 5. Equal amounts of all three channels = Gray 6. #000000 = Black 7. #FFFFFF = White

Think of the rgb color space as a cube, with each of Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow on the vertices. Then you define any hex color as point somewhere in this cube and it's pretty easy to imagine what it'll look like.

In my 20's I've done a lot of web design for about 5 years. After 2, maybe 3, years I could "see" the colors and their nuances in the hex codes. More interesting was the reverse lookup, seeing a color and visualizing the hex for it. Fun times. Not sure I still can do it...besides the most obvious ones. But then I was not bad, about 90-95% accuracy ( measured on the deviation of the light/color wavelength ).

Is it really random? It doesn't look random to me with both FF and 00 in it. Perhaps randomly chosen by yourself, but not rand(1,16mil).to_hex().

Huh? How would you determine if something was randomly chosen based on a single selection? Given all the colors available, is #FF4A00 not a possible selection in your function?

Regardless, this is incredible nitpicking. "Pick one randomly" from the human brain obviously specifies a bad PRNG. Who cares?

Whenever I pick random colors, they always suck. Most of the time it's an ugly shade of green or yellow or something. This made me wonder whether it was really randomly chosen from all colors, or a random existing color. I didn't mean to nitpick.

You're correct in pointing out that the odds of #FF4A00 being selected randomly are the same as the odds of #EAF7C2 being selected randomly; just as the odds of the Powerball numbers 1 2 3 4 5 P6 being selected randomly are just the same as the odds of the Powerball numbers 1 36 40 52 53 P20 being selected randomly. However, the odds of the former sets being selected non-randomly are greater.

TSA auctions are going to get mindblowing when they start confiscating smartphones along with pocketknives.

That color burns my eyes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com