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Splash Is a Colour Format
- Vvector 4mo agoIsn't this just RGB, with 246 of the 256 values removed from each channel?
- sunrunner 4mo agoOne could argue that it's RGB with 10 of the 256 values selected from each channel.
- tptacek 4mo agoMy other question here is, are "R", "G", and "B" channels the best way to reason about color? Isn't HSV more intuitive?
- cardamomo 4mo agoOr HCL? Or LAB? Any of these are more intuitive than RGB.
- drfloyd51 4mo agoWhat is hue zero? That’s green right? Because green is such a common color? Or maybe it’s blue.
- tptacek 4mo agoAll you're arguing is that it's easier to memorize primary and simple secondary colors in RGB. No question, it is. Once you've got one of those detent colors locked in, how do you vary it? What does it mean to bring up i% of the first channel, j% of the second, and k% of the third? That's the problem HSV solves.
- spartanatreyu 4mo agoIt's the first color of the rainbow: Red
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. for some people and use cases, hsv is better. i encourage you to try to make an equivalent format for that
- itishappy 4mo agoDespite my background in color science, I find RGB more intuitive. With HSV I have to remember the chirality of hue and it's zero point, and when changing hue I find it difficult to reason about saturation. In practice this means I must "nudge and judge" with both systems. With RGB I can always make progress. With HSV I guess hue wrong about half the time. I could probably improve this. To be fair, I'm also colorblind. That's probably relevant. Anyway, I'd say the answer to both your questions is: "sometimes"
- Sharlin 4mo agoThe point is that quantizing the range makes it easier for humans to choose colors. But there's already the #ABC hex format, which while less intuitive to non-techies has the huge advantage of being well-established.
- tptacek 4mo agoBut it doesn't make it easier for humans to choose colors. For a specific list of detent colors, it reduces the amount you have to memorize relative to full RGB. But to actually reason about colors, you want a non-arbitrary scale; HSV (for instance) gives you hue direction and then you can slide saturation and brightness around.
- Sharlin 4mo agoI don’t know, but I use #ABC a lot, it’s much more convenient than #ABCDEF, never mind [0, 256) or [0, 1]. There are of course more intuitive coordinate schemes and color models, but I find RGB easy enough when you’re not actually doing serious graphic design. This is not about having a GUI color picker either, this is about hand-typing colors. Maybe it’s just because I’m old and wrote CSS way before it got HSL or other fancy color functions, but personally, RGB colors are really deeply entrenched in my brain.
- tptacek 4mo agoI think my thing here is, you can do any notation for colors you want. "Splash" is custom. So you might as well do a better custom. "rrb85" for "red, red, blue, 80% sat, 50% value" for a dark purple --- one step towards red from the midpoint between red and blue. I don't know, something! RGB is kind of bad!
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. i use #abc a lot but i find it harder to count with letters
- Scaevolus 4mo agoIt's rgb with 3.3 bits per channel, basically 10 bit per pixel color (256 colors is 8bpp).
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. yes
- dudeinjapan 4mo agoThe 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?
- Sharlin 4mo agoAvoiding analysis paralysis, making it more intuitive to manually write colors. But yeah, there doesn't seem to be any advantage over the well-established #ABC format than decimal digits being easier to non-techies.
- justinator 4mo agoThe point is to prove that one xkcd comic
- mock-possum 4mo agoNo, TFA does very deliberately and openly explain what the goal/justification is: > Splash colours can help you avoid decision paralysis when picking colours. It's an emotional tool that stops you fussing around— trying to pick the "perfect" colour … It also means the user can deal with discrete / individual colour values in the drag-and-drop user interface. They don't have to deal with large numbers at all. Only one to nine
- qubex 4mo agoAh so let’s avoid analysis paralysis by having only black, as Ford famously ruled for the Model T. Of course that’s a reductio ad absurdum, but it’s also completely arbitrary to maintain that fewer options is better. The opposite is also equally arbitrary.
- warumdarum 4mo agoMega 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.
- mock-possum 4mo agoI 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.
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. it's not about learning to express colour sufficiently
- AnthonBerg 4mo agoI just have to say… The comments in this HN thread are The Worst. Judgy and weird and missing the point. Splash is fun and cool.
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- AnthonBerg 4mo ago"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.
- mock-possum 4mo agoI’m am not genuinely glad to see that you wasted everybody’s time with your inappropriately snarky response, if that makes you feel better - you’re reading negativity where none was intended. As I said, I am genuinely glad. Everyone ought to have fun worn their own little worlds, and feel comfortable sharing it. Maybe one day you too will get to experience that feeling.
- smilekzs 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors Macromedia Flash taught me this in the early 2000s...
- apsurd 4mo agoreminds me that there's built in color names in CSS. I use them extensively and I think this is what the OP is getting at? Not overthinking it. cornsilk and tomato are two of my favorites. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Values/named-color https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
- dist-epoch 4mo agoWhenever 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. Screenshot: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/how-to-find-and-add-pantone-colors-in-photoshop-graphics-mob--152770612350473462/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/how-to-find-and-add-pantone-co...
- sunrunner 4mo agoThis is why I like the web colours list - there's usually something close enough to what I want that helps avoid the combination cognitive trap of a colour picker and choice paralysis.
- qubex 4mo agoAs somebody who works in the coatings industry and is aware of the extremely complex field of colorimetry this horrifies me.
- zulux 4mo agoI cherish the month I spent helping a printing press company. RGB is just the start. Heck, CYMK isn't enough for all the weird inks like neon pink, silver or UV.
- qubex 4mo agoI present you the Interior Designer’s weapon of mass disruption: NCS. Worse still: European urban development projects have adopted it. I never knew there could be so many varieties of ‘ochre’.
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. splash is for screens, not coatings
- qubex 4mo agoThat’s all fine and well until somebody says “okay that’s great for the letterhead, but give me a half tone for the business card divider”.
- humbugtheman 4mo agoluckily this only happens once a week
- dang 4mo agoAlthough 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." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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- throawayonthe 4mo agotodepond can't stop winning
- zokier 4mo agoor 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 :)
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. counting to 7 is unintuitive for me
- graypegg 4mo agoI 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.
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. there are other ways to pick colours, yes
- graypegg 4mo agoSorry if that came off as a knock on what you're doing! Just thinking outloud
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- jiggawatts 4mo agoAlmost all of the other ways are dramatically superior, for humans Oklab and the Munsell colour system are very obviously far more intuitive at low numbers of quantised steps: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MunsellColorWheel.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MunsellColorWheel.sv... To be blunt: your system blithely ignores the color space, gamma curves, and human perception. There’s like… entire textbooks written on the topic of optimal encoding of hues given a fixed number of bits! That’s most of the secret sauce of Dolby Vision, for example. Sorry to burst your bubble like this, but the assumption that “RGB” means anything at all is hilariously naive. It’s like specifying a text format and neglecting to mention the encoding or the escaping rules! It will get mangled by the receiver.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- humbugtheman 4mo agooh berd
- humbugtheman 4mo agowhere are you?
- humbugtheman 4mo agoberd?
- humbugtheman 4mo agoi need your help
- humbugtheman 4mo agotode is still asleep
- humbugtheman 4mo agobot went missing
- humbugtheman 4mo agothere's no one left to do the video
- humbugtheman 4mo agoi need to make 99 sands
- humbugtheman 4mo agoin different ways
- techguy916 4mo agoThis is amazing work, but I am unsure how it helps, hex-codes were doing the trick right?
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. hex codes weren't doing the trick, no
- montroser 4mo ago> 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.
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. i got all my fussing out the way so that i could enjoy it after that
- amelius 4mo agoWe already have 3-digit hex colors, e.g. #fff is white. I don't see the point of using decimals here. You only lose resolution.
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. i find it hard to count with letters
- amelius 4mo agoWell, I find it hard to reason with RGB values. It is much easier to use HSV, to be honest, after looking up the Hue with a tool.
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. that's okay this tool is for me
- amelius 4mo agoThat's certain okay with me, but I assumed you came here to get feedback.
- humbugtheman 4mo agoi didn't
- trumpdong 4mo agoSo it's just hex colors but... not hex
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. yes that's it
- itishappy 4mo agoMore art than spec. I can dig it. 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.
- hackernulls 4mo ago[flagged]
- boltzmann64 4mo agothen, why does 222 look blue/green and not dark gray?
- Twey 4mo ago> I like my colours to have a bit more blue and green in them, so I skewed everything that direction. Colours like 222 look a tiny bit bluer / greener than you'd expect. It might be hard to see but trust me, it's true babe
- wvbdmp 4mo agoUsing a LUT to harmonize raw “working” colors is actually kind of genius. Interesting.
- remix2000 4mo ago3⅓ bpc linear RGB sales pitch oughtta be as close as we get to selling time to a clock before the markets collapse
- humbugtheman 4mo agoauthor here. i'm not selling anything