7 ms·

The Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination

ericsoderstrom 8y ago
For anyone who is very particular about their color schemes: I'd recommend checking out the base16 project [1]. It's a collection of well-maintained color schemes (including solarized) for basically every text editor and terminal emulator. It makes switching between different schemes very easy, and includes tools for keeping your editor colors in sync with your terminal. [1]: http://chriskempson.com/projects/base16/ http://chriskempson.com/projects/base16/
- java-man 8y ago
  I noticed it's more difficult to create a good light theme. The colors appear vibrant on a dark background, but things are very different on a white background: in order to have high contract text one needs to use dark colors of different colors, and it gets harder to tell the difference. Do you know any good colors specifically for light themes? Solarized family is too dark (for me, at least).
  - ericsoderstrom 8y ago
    I've never found a light color scheme I really liked either. Was using base16-ia-light for a little while though.
  - 1996 8y ago
    Agreed, but change the background to something lighter and solarized-light is not so bad. Bonus: it's widely supported, so you only change one color My suggestion is a light yellowish grey: BackgroundColour=236,231,225 Bonus of using light themes instead of dark themes: you can invert your colors at night. It is easy on your eyes, and the browser and the rest of the system also follow suit. I recommanad to use NegativeScreen + a red matrix so everything is in shade of red.
    - java-man 8y ago
      That's the thing: I don't want to have dim background. In fact, I would rather prefer a bight background. The main reason that could be due to the fact that a bright background forces the pupil to narrow, making the text sharper for older people.
orev 8y ago
> neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer Oh my god. Really?! You have to be kidding me. This phrase means: the color of static - gray and moving with flecks of random color. It has always meant this and always will. It’s inexcusable that a Wired writer doesn’t know this. Even TVs that show the blue screen still show static for a second before the blue kicks in. I simply don’t believe that anyone really doesn’t know what static looks like, and this blue sky myth is just some kind of in-joke.
- java-man 8y ago
  he probably meant old school CRT, which did indeed had a bluish tint.
  - cannam 8y ago
    "I actually composed that first image with black and white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost painful" (https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-was-the-sky-above-the-port-in-neuromancer/163310 https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-...) - so it was intended (even if not necessarily read) as grey static at the time. I always assumed the reference was to the sky being full of debris which reflected light, like a chaotic horizon-spanning disco ball.
  - orev 8y ago
    No, it did not mean blue or any kind of blue tint. He meant gray. And I can’t say that any CRT I saw had a tint towards any color specifically.
    - baking 8y ago
      It is kind of a well-known metaphor that if you walked through a neighborhood at night you could see the bluish tint from the TVs of families watching in darkened rooms. (At least before color television https://lightinganalysts.com/blue-light-hazards-and-television/ https://lightinganalysts.com/blue-light-hazards-and-televisi...)
baking 8y ago
I started programming on VT-100s, moved to the IBM monochome (green) and then amber screens (over-hyped in my opinion.) Younger guys and their EVGA monitors would program in yellow on magenta which I couldn't stand. But nothing is as bad for readability to my 60 year old eyes as all forms of gray on gray. Anyone trying to use a historical argument for this color scheme seems misguided to me.
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  Same here. I do not understand the desire of these candy colors and what purpose they serve. Purportedly, it helps people find function or variable names but, in reality, it's just a blur of colors, each of which can mean multiple things. Give me white on black any day. I do like bold or gray on certain properties but only if it can be consistent and it's rarely consistent.
  - kqr 8y ago
    I agree so much. I always have to create my own colour scheme for this reason. I want almost everything to be white on black, or black on white, and then I have like three exceptions to that: - source code comments are a slightly more dim gray and literal strings are a slightly more dim green, because they're characters that can look like code, but generally have no semantic meaning to the program; - structural keywords are an orangeish-brown to highlight the syntactical structure of the code; and - types belong to a different world than the syntax tree, so they are a contrasting blue. That's it. I don't want any more than that.
saagarjha 8y ago
> "When Apple introduced dark mode for MacOS, I thought it was cool," says Bir, the Virginia programmer and artist. "But I wish it was Solarized." I’m not sure I understand what this means. Do they want UI elements to be Solarized?
weinzierl 8y ago
This is about the Solarized color scheme from Ethan Schoonover. This is the color scheme I use and love and am grateful to Ethan that he made it. That being said, "The Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination" is a stretch - a big stretch. For one thing, going by Ethan's own description of the selection process, there was not much math involved: Schoonover talks a lot about the mathematical nature of his color selections, but he picked the starting colors, a blue and a yellow, for very personal reasons. The blue reminds him of his long standing thalassophobia, the fear of very deep water. And though he says he doesn't otherwise experience synesthesia—such as hearing colors or tasting words—the yellow invokes tastes and smells he associates with his childhood. "My parents are artists, I'm comfortable picking things for obscure reasons," he says. For another thing, even if it was strictly based on a color circle, that wouldn't make it more "mathematical". The color circle of current fashion isn't much more than a historical accident and besides the basic order of the main colors there isn't much science behind it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
monokai_nl 8y ago
I like the idea of symmetry of Solarized. I know how much work goes into creating a balanced color scheme. One thing that’s super hard is to match the same perceived level of brightness across different hues, while also being aesthetically pleasing. To balance that out is a lot of work but ultimately leads to a more harmonious picture that’s easy to read. I gave it my best shot for https://www.monokai.pro https://www.monokai.pro
espeed 8y ago
Blue and Green for the Web in 1999! https://www.nngroup.com/books/designing-web-usability/ https://www.nngroup.com/books/designing-web-usability/
techbio 8y ago
1. Read the article, entertain the premise. 2. Install solarized from github on IntelliJ 3. Realize the editor frame and the rest of the UI don't match. 4. Back out install. 5. Finally, conclude that I actually do not want all editors I use to have the same color scheme; the differences in appearance serve to cue my mind that each editor operates differently, does things in different ways, and I am already equipped with sufficient cognitive dissonance not to add another layer.

For anyone who is very particular about their color schemes: I'd recommend checking out the base16 project [1]. It's a collection of well-maintained color schemes (including solarized) for basically every text editor and terminal emulator. It makes switching between different schemes very easy, and includes tools for keeping your editor colors in sync with your terminal. [1]: http://chriskempson.com/projects/base16/ http://chriskempson.com/projects/base16/

java-man 8y ago
I noticed it's more difficult to create a good light theme. The colors appear vibrant on a dark background, but things are very different on a white background: in order to have high contract text one needs to use dark colors of different colors, and it gets harder to tell the difference. Do you know any good colors specifically for light themes? Solarized family is too dark (for me, at least).
- ericsoderstrom 8y ago
  I've never found a light color scheme I really liked either. Was using base16-ia-light for a little while though.
- 1996 8y ago
  Agreed, but change the background to something lighter and solarized-light is not so bad. Bonus: it's widely supported, so you only change one color My suggestion is a light yellowish grey: BackgroundColour=236,231,225 Bonus of using light themes instead of dark themes: you can invert your colors at night. It is easy on your eyes, and the browser and the rest of the system also follow suit. I recommanad to use NegativeScreen + a red matrix so everything is in shade of red.
  - java-man 8y ago
    That's the thing: I don't want to have dim background. In fact, I would rather prefer a bight background. The main reason that could be due to the fact that a bright background forces the pupil to narrow, making the text sharper for older people.

orev 8y ago

> neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer Oh my god. Really?! You have to be kidding me. This phrase means: the color of static - gray and moving with flecks of random color. It has always meant this and always will. It’s inexcusable that a Wired writer doesn’t know this. Even TVs that show the blue screen still show static for a second before the blue kicks in. I simply don’t believe that anyone really doesn’t know what static looks like, and this blue sky myth is just some kind of in-joke.

java-man 8y ago
he probably meant old school CRT, which did indeed had a bluish tint.
- cannam 8y ago
  "I actually composed that first image with black and white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost painful" (https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-was-the-sky-above-the-port-in-neuromancer/163310 https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-...) - so it was intended (even if not necessarily read) as grey static at the time. I always assumed the reference was to the sky being full of debris which reflected light, like a chaotic horizon-spanning disco ball.
- orev 8y ago
  No, it did not mean blue or any kind of blue tint. He meant gray. And I can’t say that any CRT I saw had a tint towards any color specifically.
  - baking 8y ago
    It is kind of a well-known metaphor that if you walked through a neighborhood at night you could see the bluish tint from the TVs of families watching in darkened rooms. (At least before color television https://lightinganalysts.com/blue-light-hazards-and-television/ https://lightinganalysts.com/blue-light-hazards-and-televisi...)

baking 8y ago

I started programming on VT-100s, moved to the IBM monochome (green) and then amber screens (over-hyped in my opinion.) Younger guys and their EVGA monitors would program in yellow on magenta which I couldn't stand. But nothing is as bad for readability to my 60 year old eyes as all forms of gray on gray. Anyone trying to use a historical argument for this color scheme seems misguided to me.

sureaboutthis 8y ago
Same here. I do not understand the desire of these candy colors and what purpose they serve. Purportedly, it helps people find function or variable names but, in reality, it's just a blur of colors, each of which can mean multiple things. Give me white on black any day. I do like bold or gray on certain properties but only if it can be consistent and it's rarely consistent.
- kqr 8y ago
  I agree so much. I always have to create my own colour scheme for this reason. I want almost everything to be white on black, or black on white, and then I have like three exceptions to that: - source code comments are a slightly more dim gray and literal strings are a slightly more dim green, because they're characters that can look like code, but generally have no semantic meaning to the program; - structural keywords are an orangeish-brown to highlight the syntactical structure of the code; and - types belong to a different world than the syntax tree, so they are a contrasting blue. That's it. I don't want any more than that.

saagarjha 8y ago

> "When Apple introduced dark mode for MacOS, I thought it was cool," says Bir, the Virginia programmer and artist. "But I wish it was Solarized." I’m not sure I understand what this means. Do they want UI elements to be Solarized?

weinzierl 8y ago

This is about the Solarized color scheme from Ethan Schoonover. This is the color scheme I use and love and am grateful to Ethan that he made it. That being said, "The Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination" is a stretch - a big stretch. For one thing, going by Ethan's own description of the selection process, there was not much math involved: Schoonover talks a lot about the mathematical nature of his color selections, but he picked the starting colors, a blue and a yellow, for very personal reasons. The blue reminds him of his long standing thalassophobia, the fear of very deep water. And though he says he doesn't otherwise experience synesthesia—such as hearing colors or tasting words—the yellow invokes tastes and smells he associates with his childhood. "My parents are artists, I'm comfortable picking things for obscure reasons," he says. For another thing, even if it was strictly based on a color circle, that wouldn't make it more "mathematical". The color circle of current fashion isn't much more than a historical accident and besides the basic order of the main colors there isn't much science behind it.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

monokai_nl 8y ago

I like the idea of symmetry of Solarized. I know how much work goes into creating a balanced color scheme. One thing that’s super hard is to match the same perceived level of brightness across different hues, while also being aesthetically pleasing. To balance that out is a lot of work but ultimately leads to a more harmonious picture that’s easy to read. I gave it my best shot for https://www.monokai.pro https://www.monokai.pro

espeed 8y ago

Blue and Green for the Web in 1999! https://www.nngroup.com/books/designing-web-usability/ https://www.nngroup.com/books/designing-web-usability/

techbio 8y ago

1. Read the article, entertain the premise. 2. Install solarized from github on IntelliJ 3. Realize the editor frame and the rest of the UI don't match. 4. Back out install. 5. Finally, conclude that I actually do not want all editors I use to have the same color scheme; the differences in appearance serve to cue my mind that each editor operates differently, does things in different ways, and I am already equipped with sufficient cognitive dissonance not to add another layer.