I 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.
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.
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 :)
reminds 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.
The 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.
But 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.
I 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.
I 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!
All 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.
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.
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.
This 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.
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.
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?
Avoiding 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.
No, 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
Ah 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.
Worse still: European urban development projects have adopted it. I never knew there could be so many varieties of ‘ochre’.
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.
Macromedia Flash taught me this in the early 2000s...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
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.
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...
I AM genuinely glad this person is having fun with the little world they’re creating, and that they’re bothering to share it.
> 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
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.