> Most of what you can read about historical color on the web has been rewritten three or four times from the same Wikipedia paragraph, with the citations dropped along the way. What you are reading here is an attempt to put the citations back.
That implies the entries also are based on the Wikipedia paragraph, though I think the author means they do their own research. The entries I looked at list several high-quality entries in a bibliography at the bottom but don't cite any of the text. Also, I don't know who wrote these - do they have any idea what they are talking about? Is this LLM output?
If anonymity ever worked (almost never in scholarship), it may not work anymore due to LLMs.
i do like the concept, though the blatantly claude-tinged "italicized word" visual language undermines the author's credibility w.r.t graphic design history imo
The author produces a very nice range of oil colors under the Langridge brand in Melbourne, downunder... its nice to keep these artisanal practices alive.
Would be handy to have the standard pigment codes. Ive been gradually moving away from using heavy metals such as Cadmiums. Haven't found the perfect red, although Napthol Red PR170 and Pyrrole "Ferrari" Red PR254 are pretty close to primary for mixing from a limited palette.
Its really surprising how you can get gorgeous brick-red browns and deep purplish blacks from mixing a near primary red and primary blue.
This is the kind of note I was hoping for. Standard pigment codes (PR170, PR254 etc) are a good call and I wanted a proper Color Index field and this pushes it up the list. I will also take another look at the Van Dyke Brown swatch. You may be right that it reads too close to burnt sienna. Chromatopia looks like a lovely book and thanks for the Langridge pointer, glad those artisanal makers are still going.
Here in Northern Europe there seems to be something of a renaissance of traditional linseed oil paints, both because of people being more environmentally conscious and wanting to avoid VOC's and microplastics, but also because there's plenty of scare stories of people rotting their houses after painting them with more modern but less breathable paints like the usual alkyds or acrylics.
Not saying it's not possible to be successful with the modern paints, but they demand a different style of construction that allows air to flow on the backside of the facade.
The web has its own storied color, albeit a tragic one. Rebecca Purple is a named CSS color, which was added in tribute to Eric Meyer's daughter, who very sadly passed away at a young age. That shade was her favorite color.
That's pretty cool. In a similar but very different vein: A few years ago I took twenty years of daily satellite imagery and computed the mean color for countries and the world https://www.landshade.com/
But in doing that you really do notice how everything concerning colors is just a bit arbitrary. You get raw reflectances from a scientific sensor on a satellite with specific spectral bands and sensitivity within those bands. And then you try and map this scientific sensor to the sensor that is your eyes, to try and emulate what we would actually see if shot up into space.
I wanted to check if the information on this page was correct. I started searching and found this site [0], which looks very similar. I thought it was made by the same person, but it's not. It's just another website designed using LLM.
One advantage of LLM is that you can quickly and easily generate a "pretty decent" website. However, there is a drawback, that there is a high chance that a page with a very similar design(and similar idea) already exists somewhere.
I think they are made by different people/organizations. Chinese colors is by TOTM Tech, which sells various (pretty obviously vibe coded) design tools and assets. OP doesn't sell anything so I don't think they are related.
My home town was famous for the red cloth that the British Army used to wear. This same red cloth was the main 'trade cloth' for the East India company and native peoples, the world over, just wanted it. The East India company wasn't paying for stuff in silver, the red cloth was worth more than that.
As for why my home town dominated the red cloth trade, well, there are reasons. The 14th century plague is part of the story as that is when sheep took over the land. Thanks to the British weather, the sheep developed a hard wearing wool which was perfect for the armies of the world and for clothing the slaves of the world.
Then geology came into play, with an abundance of Fuller's Earth, important for getting the wool clean. Coupled with that were teasels, necessary for processing the wool. Even the water comes into it, since the Industrial Revolution started with water wheel power.
Eventually competition came from Yorkshire for this particular broadcloth. Many aeons later, WW1 came along and charging into battle with red tunics became somewhat fatal. That was it for the product.
Sure, this particular red is one of the billions of colours out there, so it is of no surprise that it is omitted, however, the history is awesome, but you need someone that knows their history to tell the story.
LLMs lack passion and the ability to interpret varying sources in the way that a historian can. Notionally there is depth of knowledge with LLMs, since everything ever written is known, but then there is no depth of knowledge. You read, and read and read, to learn very little.
We have an interesting 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should' aspect of LLMs. I appreciate that, superficially, this website looks awesome, but who is it for?
As a HN person, I need P3 OKLCH colours and I have an expectation that the colour in question will stay on the page, at least as a sticky header. I would also expect a 3D-modelling style 'sphere', showing the specular highlight, diffuse and ambient lighting to be showing how the colour works. I appreciate that my art friends have no idea what I am on about here, so what do they get?
Anyone British that has an artist's studio and a brush will have many, many Winsor and Newton colours, they are a major brand and truly storied, at least in the UK. Clearly they put some effort into 'evergreen content' by writing up their various colours.
As for whom they are writing for, they have customers! They didn't pay people to write blog articles just because they could, they did it because they should. They have product to shift.
I am sure they did a little bit of keyword stuffing with their blog articles, as was the fashion, and all of it is 'marketing', but still, it is much better writing than anything LLM.
Getting back to 'should' and 'could', the crux of the matter is if you have something of value. True value, according to some economics people, is a product of human labour, with machines not really cutting it, unless you count the human effort needed to design, make, maintain and calibrate the machine.
It is a bit of a controversial opinion, however, I think the only value of doing things the LLM way is just that, you can prove that you can do things the LLM way. This is legitimate in a job marketplace that demands AI with everything. But, once that novelty has worn off?
We will see what survives the test of time. Maybe Winsor and Newton will sack their content creators and just get an LLM to churn out blog articles. But, would any of that have any value?
Nope.
Would any of it survive the test of time?
Nope.
An added aspect to LLM use is criticism. Humans deserve respect and you can't just go around dissing the hard work of others because that...
Cool idea, but unfortunately low-effort AI slop. The colors are covered in vibe-coded patterns that obscure the actual color, much of the writing is wrong and soulless. The prompter writes on the site that he uses AI to support in writing, because as a man with a day job it would be "impossible" to write all this himself. I'd urge him to write in his own words, starting with a minimal subset of colors and slowly building up a library. It could be a "one entry per day" challenge, or even just "one entry per week". Why is everyone in such a rush?
I have an acquaintance who is a professional artist[1]. He has some great stories about colours/paints/pigments. I suppose it's akin to tales of who created a particular programming tool/compiler, or when a language weirdly added gotos (PHP!). It's great to hear experts opine on their craft. Not sure we have that here, but still.
27 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 56.8 ms ] threadThat implies the entries also are based on the Wikipedia paragraph, though I think the author means they do their own research. The entries I looked at list several high-quality entries in a bibliography at the bottom but don't cite any of the text. Also, I don't know who wrote these - do they have any idea what they are talking about? Is this LLM output?
If anonymity ever worked (almost never in scholarship), it may not work anymore due to LLMs.
You may also enjoy the Chromatopia book : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40554590-chromatopia
The author produces a very nice range of oil colors under the Langridge brand in Melbourne, downunder... its nice to keep these artisanal practices alive.
Would be handy to have the standard pigment codes. Ive been gradually moving away from using heavy metals such as Cadmiums. Haven't found the perfect red, although Napthol Red PR170 and Pyrrole "Ferrari" Red PR254 are pretty close to primary for mixing from a limited palette.
Its really surprising how you can get gorgeous brick-red browns and deep purplish blacks from mixing a near primary red and primary blue.
Not saying it's not possible to be successful with the modern paints, but they demand a different style of construction that allows air to flow on the backside of the facade.
https://medium.com/@valgaze/the-hidden-purple-memorial-in-yo...
First example I saw was already wrong. COBALT BLUE is not known since 1830 but its ANCIENT.
This webpage is some low effort english centric world and wrong and probably just AI slop.
But in doing that you really do notice how everything concerning colors is just a bit arbitrary. You get raw reflectances from a scientific sensor on a satellite with specific spectral bands and sensitivity within those bands. And then you try and map this scientific sensor to the sensor that is your eyes, to try and emulate what we would actually see if shot up into space.
There's some really cool science around that if you're a color nerd: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003442571...
One advantage of LLM is that you can quickly and easily generate a "pretty decent" website. However, there is a drawback, that there is a high chance that a page with a very similar design(and similar idea) already exists somewhere.
[0]: https://chinesecoloratlas.com/
What are the odds of both websites showing the same color today (Cochineal and 胭脂)?
And both use Roman numerals MMXXVI ? It makes no sense to use that in a "Chinese" color website.
> MMXXVI
That too. LLMs love to writing year in roman numeral. https://github.com/search?q=%22%C2%B7+MMXXVI%22&type=code There are 2.8k of these in github.
> the same color today
Looks liks Chinese colors always show that color in Hero section? It's coincidence I think.
https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/
and the survey
https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317227
As for why my home town dominated the red cloth trade, well, there are reasons. The 14th century plague is part of the story as that is when sheep took over the land. Thanks to the British weather, the sheep developed a hard wearing wool which was perfect for the armies of the world and for clothing the slaves of the world.
Then geology came into play, with an abundance of Fuller's Earth, important for getting the wool clean. Coupled with that were teasels, necessary for processing the wool. Even the water comes into it, since the Industrial Revolution started with water wheel power.
Eventually competition came from Yorkshire for this particular broadcloth. Many aeons later, WW1 came along and charging into battle with red tunics became somewhat fatal. That was it for the product.
Sure, this particular red is one of the billions of colours out there, so it is of no surprise that it is omitted, however, the history is awesome, but you need someone that knows their history to tell the story.
LLMs lack passion and the ability to interpret varying sources in the way that a historian can. Notionally there is depth of knowledge with LLMs, since everything ever written is known, but then there is no depth of knowledge. You read, and read and read, to learn very little.
We have an interesting 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should' aspect of LLMs. I appreciate that, superficially, this website looks awesome, but who is it for?
As a HN person, I need P3 OKLCH colours and I have an expectation that the colour in question will stay on the page, at least as a sticky header. I would also expect a 3D-modelling style 'sphere', showing the specular highlight, diffuse and ambient lighting to be showing how the colour works. I appreciate that my art friends have no idea what I am on about here, so what do they get?
Here is an example from the pre-LLM days:
https://uk.winsornewton.com/blogs/articles/winsor-blue
Anyone British that has an artist's studio and a brush will have many, many Winsor and Newton colours, they are a major brand and truly storied, at least in the UK. Clearly they put some effort into 'evergreen content' by writing up their various colours.
As for whom they are writing for, they have customers! They didn't pay people to write blog articles just because they could, they did it because they should. They have product to shift.
I am sure they did a little bit of keyword stuffing with their blog articles, as was the fashion, and all of it is 'marketing', but still, it is much better writing than anything LLM.
Getting back to 'should' and 'could', the crux of the matter is if you have something of value. True value, according to some economics people, is a product of human labour, with machines not really cutting it, unless you count the human effort needed to design, make, maintain and calibrate the machine.
It is a bit of a controversial opinion, however, I think the only value of doing things the LLM way is just that, you can prove that you can do things the LLM way. This is legitimate in a job marketplace that demands AI with everything. But, once that novelty has worn off?
We will see what survives the test of time. Maybe Winsor and Newton will sack their content creators and just get an LLM to churn out blog articles. But, would any of that have any value?
Nope.
Would any of it survive the test of time?
Nope.
An added aspect to LLM use is criticism. Humans deserve respect and you can't just go around dissing the hard work of others because that...
https://www.alastairjohngordon.com