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17 points by tobr 3 days ago | 17 comments

qubex 26 minutes ago

As somebody who works in the coatings industry and is aware of the extremely complex field of colorimetry this horrifies me.

warumdarum 3 hours ago

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.

smilekzs 2 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors

Macromedia Flash taught me this in the early 2000s...

Vvector 3 hours ago

Isn't this just RGB, with 246 of the 256 values removed from each channel?

Sharlin 3 hours ago

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.

tptacek 37 minutes ago

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.

Scaevolus 36 minutes ago

It's rgb with 3.3 bits per channel, basically 10 bit per pixel color (256 colors is 8bpp).

tptacek 3 hours ago

My other question here is, are "R", "G", and "B" channels the best way to reason about color? Isn't HSV more intuitive?

cardamomo 3 hours ago

Or HCL? Or LAB? Any of these are more intuitive than RGB.

dist-epoch 55 minutes ago

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.

Screenshot: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/how-to-find-and-add-pantone-co...

mock-possum 2 hours ago

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.

dudeinjapan 3 hours ago

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?

Sharlin 3 hours ago

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.

justinator 3 hours ago

The point is to prove that one xkcd comic

qubex 24 minutes ago

927

mock-possum 2 hours ago

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

qubex 23 minutes ago

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.