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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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."
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 :)
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
36 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 61.8 ms ] threadI 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.
Macromedia Flash taught me this in the early 2000s...
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...
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.
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.
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
https://pigment.ribbits.org/?c=bwwkkkk
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.
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.
I don't see the point of using decimals here. You only lose resolution.
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.