Please.js – Random Pleasing Colors | Hacker News Reader

Please.js – Random Pleasing Colors

checkman.io

120 pointsalixaxel31 comments

This is highly subjective, but to me, it's biased to output colors that are more web-safe palette meets pastel colors than pleasing.

You're not wrong. But pleasing is pretty subjective so I shot for what I liked and I hoped people would agree. That being said, you can alter the saturation and value manually to get more or less intense colors.

I like this, though, as it makes it more useful for specific purposes - especially alerts, buttons, and background colours.

Every time I come across one of these color generators it just reminds how much a good designer is worth. Putting together a pleasing color palette with the appropriate amount of contrast, interest, and color quality is really hard to do. I always laugh when our designer updates color values to ones that may look identical to me, but as soon as they are implemented and play off the other colors in the design (including the white space) everything just instantly feels more polished.

Very similar to randomColor.js: http://llllll.li/randomColor/

Definitely need a contrast mode. I've been thinking about forking randomColor.js for the last week to implement that feature actually..

You're absolutely right, contrast options are something I've been meaning to add for a while. Please do!

As a colourblind person who struggles with coming up with good looking colour schemes, this looks really nice.

I've used the likes of Palleton [1] and Kubler [2] before but they seem to be geared towards graphic designers and people who actually understand terms like adjacent, triad and compliment in the context of colours.

[1] http://www.paletton.com/

[2] https://kuler.adobe.com/create/color-wheel

This is MIT licensed [0] but the author should probably note that on the website page or in a LICENSE file.

[0] https://github.com/Fooidge/PleaseJS/blob/master/bower.json

In the case where you retrieve multiple random colours, is there a chance you could add a setting that doesn't return colours that are too close to each other?

As an addition to this, it may be possible to modify it in such a way that it always returns colours that meet WCAG2 AA/AAA contrast requirements

Does it have an API for generating contrasting colors? For instance for a chart, you'd like to generate a set of colors that are all not too alike each other.

Pretty cool. I added it to add some colors to our website: http://referralhire.com Thanks!

Its getting obvious to me now, if a good designer suggests color add them else shutup and keep it white or black :)

Hey guys, I'm the guy that wrote this. Colorblind mode and contrast are common suggestions and I'm totally working on adding them in. In the meantime, thanks for all the feedback and enjoy using Please.

Thanks, it looks cool! However, you should probably add something to the docs that mentions that make_scheme requires an HSV color as a param.

Will do!

I made a jsfiddle for playing around with the API: http://jsfiddle.net/MsXrp/1/

I'm quite happy with what I see so far.

I like the colors it generated for me very much... But it should also have the ability to generate ugly colors. It's just not fair to favor the pleasing colors so heavily.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824684

Now hook this up to your A/B test variations on a few components...

It would be nice if this could output colors for something like a heatmap.

How about this? http://colorbrewer2.org/

Someone make a bookmarklet to fix unpleasing web sites using this.

Somewhat unrelated, but i'd like an API similar to this... but the colors would contrast well for someone who is color blind.

I beg your pardon, but what do you mean an API? This JavaScript library has an API, Application Programming Interface. Just use it.

He probably means REST API as that seems to have become the default meaning of API, unfortunately.

That was something I suspected as well, but that doesn't seem to make any sense. Why would anyone want to use a REST API to select colors when a local lib with similar functionality exists?

You are actually both mistaken. I'm quite sure he understands what a javascript library is. He is simply asking for a library with a similar API, with the qualification that the colors are not truly random, but contrast with each other in a significant manner. Don't be so hasty to conclude that someone is saying something stupid because you might not agree with the phrasing. Try and understand and add to the discussion if you're going to respond.

Thanks, for standing up. This is exactly what I was saying.

I absolutely did not mean REST API. I've been doing this for 10 years, I know what a javascript library was. Why do programmers automatically default to assuming incompetence?

because the word API (referring to a REST API) seems to be one of the currently trendy ones in the tech churn, and is the answer to almost every problem that can't be fixed by a NoSQL database.

Sorry, I guess technically, yes i'd like a javascript library. You kind of missed the point.

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