Colors – A nicer color palette for the web
clrs.cc
clrs.cc
It isn't a joke. It's what i use personally as a designer and I thought I'd open source it. If you don't like the colors, they are pretty easy to change.
I agree with gp about the change in colour distances though. Can't use your palette as a drop-in on older pages
But at the same time, I don't use your CSS file. I think the commenter above who's hating on this thinks some of it might be redundant. I guess it depends on your use-case and what kind of styling you do... I am by no means a CSS/web designing expert. For my projects personally, I just your use the HEX code of your new default colors whenever I need it. And I keep it bookmarked it for reference.
(Basically it looks red on my IPS panels, but very very orange on my TNs. The same panels - not from the same manufacturer - also make the actual orange look more like a goldenrod.)
Already, sRGB’s FF0000 is quite definitely on the orange side of neutral (I tend to call the sRGB primaries “orangish red”, “yellowish green”, and “purplish blue” for clarity when trying to explain technical aspects of color to non-experts).
So when they push toward an even oranger color, it starts getting silly to still keep calling it “red”.
Actually in general, the palette at clrs.cc (while it might have been carefully be internally harmonized) is not all that close to the labels that typical English speakers attach to those color words. For instance, what this palette calls “olive” is much closer to neutral green than what it calls “green” (and is entirely unrelated to the color people typically call “olive”).
Additionally, there’s such a dramatic variation in saturation (technically, “chroma”) between colors in this palette that I don’t think they work especially well together. Some of the colors are muted and others are crazy colorful. This is what happens when you only pick colors at the very edge of the sRGB gamut.
I did wonder about that, especially when desaturating "pure" blue produced a kind of lilac, and when I got a cyan (rather than green) after-image from "pure" red.
Thanks for confirming.
Out of interest, where would you say neutral red, green and blue fall in the sRGB space (or are they out of gamut)?
(Note, the “hue” measure used in spaces like HSL/HSV is non-uniform, especially in the blue–purple range. So that explains part of the effect you see when you “desaturate” sRGB #0000FF. Your “desaturate” operation is also shifting the hue, if you define hue based on human perception.)
http://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-basic-lessons/lesson...
Further, if you click around there's a few more chapters relevant to colours that put this theory into practice (in the context of raytracing and rendering):
http://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-advanced-lessons/bla...
http://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-advanced-lessons/sim...
False Conclusion: Don't use black on a web page because nothing in nature is actually black.
False Assumption: The black on a web page is actually pure black.
True Conclusion: Use black if you want to - it won't be pure black, it will simply be the darkest you can get.
PS. This is also true for paint: Black paint is also not pure black. " -ars https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6581935
Kinda unrelated story: I ran into trouble using "true black" (A combo of CMYK) on a van wrap. In all the testing I did, it looked fine, but outdoors, it looked green. But photos of the wrap looked fine. (the camera has a uv filter?) Figured out that the cyan ink fluorescenced in daylight with that combo of ink and material at least. And converted it to just black ink for the next ones.
And, of course, almost pure black does exist in nature (look in a deep hole some day). It's only rare.
1) Provide a matrix of all 32 colors and a list of the 16 color terms. Ask people to pick the tile that best matches each color term.
2) Provide the matrix of colored icons/logos that uses the new palate, and the same matrix using the old palate. Ask people to pick the prettier matrix.
I don't think the new palate has any chance of winning the first contest. It might win the second. Perhaps that's the point.
The reason for “web safe” colors was that most color displays in the mid-1990s used a 256-color palette to render everything on screen, so any colors not in the palette would be dithered. Browsers had their palettes set to include the 216 “web safe” colors in addition to various operating system default colors. Web safe is basically irrelevant to anything since sometime in the mid-2000s.
Web safe colors render just as inconsistently across uncharacterized displays as any other colors. And when the displays are properly characterized (“calibrated” is the popular word for this, but not quite technically right), colors at the very corners of the gamut (like FF0000 or whatever) are actually much likelier to vary, if any of the displays’ gamuts doesn’t cover the entirety of the sRGB gamut.
[0]http://colours.neilorangepeel.com/ [1]http://www.google.com/design/spec/style/color.html#color-ui-...
I am quite certain hundreds of hours of testing went into picking these shaded given different monitors and devices available....in the 90's.
Things were quite ad hoc in the early days!
That said, there were probably specific reasons why those colors were chosen, reasons that might not make so much sense today.
Oh I remember - it's to fit into the 256 colour palette of gifs and old school graphics adapters that can't store too many bits! If you wanted more colours, you had to swap out the pallette.
I don't think that applies today anymore, even on the most basic computers.