4 ms·
Unfortunately the colors of the web-safe color palette that we all know[1] (and hopefully hate) that results from combining 00, 33, 66, 99, CC and FF into tripl
by chavesn 12y ago
Unfortunately the colors of the web-safe color palette that we all know[1] (and hopefully hate) that results from combining 00, 33, 66, 99, CC and FF into triplet permutations has extremely poor color distribution.
Can you find any oranges in that color picker? Maybe 2. What about blues or reds? Pretty much the same. But you can find a ton of teals, purples, and pinks!
This is because producing naive permutations of fixed steps results mostly in muddy hue variance between the primaries. This is not the natural way we see color variance. It results in far too many unique hues and not enough shades of the "good" hues ("red", "orange", "yellow", etc.). We only really distinguish between 7-15 hues at a basic level, but then we are used to seeing many shades of those same hues.
In addition, because the way the permutations are created it would be a ton of work to figure out how to sort them by hue. And if you did, you would notice just how many hues there are (way too many to care about having so many).
A much better color picker will take just a handful of hues (again, 7-15 or so) and then present varying shades (lighter, usually, but also darker for more variance) of them. Another crucial factor is to make sure the color picker includes a row for all shades from black to white (which at least this color picker has done).
For an example of a color picker that does this well with just a handful of colors, see the Google docs color picker.[2] You'll notice how much more pleasing it is to the eye.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors
[2]: https://www.google.com/help/hc/images/docs/docs_1696586_color_picker_en.gif https://www.google.com/help/hc/images/docs/docs_1696586_colo...
- bilalq 12y agoAll excellent points! However, the default palette here is not based on the web safe colors, but on the colors from xterm-256color. More importantly, the palette is entirely customizable on a per instance basis of this picker. You can use this component to build something similar to the one from the Google docs picker just by passing in a string array of the palette. My primary motivation for building this was to help applications that target CLIs. Things like colorscheme generators/editors for vim & emacs can benefit greatly from this.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]