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A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

Etheryte

Wish there was a way to make it stop spinning, it's practically impossible to figure out adjacent colors because everything keeps moving no matter what you do. Perhaps there is a way, but I didn't find it?

graypegg

https://codepen.io/graypegg/full/XJXoxYB

Only change is lines 421 + 422 that sloooowly rotated the cube are commented out in the javascript, otherwise should act the same!

null

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whatsupdog

Same. So annoying.

jjcm

One thing I'd love to see is a comparison between named colors and colors in use. What areas are under represented by named colors?

wormius

Is the initial setting (Color Name List) a list of ALL the colors in each "sub" category listed in the drop menu?

If so, would it be possible to put a "namespace" in front (like html.violet, or html::violet). That way you see which source it's from? That way you know where it's from (though I realize this may cause multiple "hits" on the same value/name) Or perhaps same names have different values.

Either way, pretty cool. I agree, it would be nice to have a button or mode to stop spinning without having to hack it manually.

rezmason

Bravo! I love color and color spaces.

I've been researching the way classic Macs quantize colors to limited palettes:

https://rezmason.net/retrospectrum/color-cube

This cube is the "inverse table" used to map colors to a palette. The animated regions are tints and shades of pure red, green, and blue. Ideally, this cube would be a voronoi diagram, but that would be prohibitively expensive for Macs of the late eighties. Instead, they mapped the palette colors to indices into the table, and expanded the regions assigned to those colors via a simultaneous flood fill, like if you clicked the Paint Bucket tool with multiple colors in multiple places at the same time. Except in 3D.

dougb5

Great project! It's visually dazzling and it really drives home the sheer size of the universe(s) of named colors.

I've long been interested in the names of colors and their associations. If I may plug my own site a bit, check out the "color thesaurus" feature on OneLook that organizes color names more linearly. Start with mauve, as an example: https://onelook.com/?w=mauve&colors=1 (It also lets you see the words evoked by the color and vice versa, which was a fun LLM-driven analysis.)

Tempest1981

And how far things have come since the X11 color names

kouru225

Very clearly shows much more sensitive our eyes are to luminance rather than hue or saturation, which was the main observation that allowed for the high compression rate of JPEG

Eric_WVGG

I use a similar app called Name That Color — https://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#6195ED

I like sharing descriptive names with designers instead of naming everything "light blue" "dark blue" "not quite as light but still not dark blue" etc.

This new thing is tons of fun but seems a bit less practically useful.

chime

You just reminded me that my app turned 18 a few months ago.

Another dev, Daniel Flück, extended the app to help color blind users: https://www.color-blindness.com/color-name-hue/

CobrastanJorji

Neat!

Feature request: I want the name of the color I'm hovering over to pop up next to the color. I don't want to have to look in the top left to see the name, especially with the board spinning. Also, I want the specific circle I'm hovering over to get a bit bigger so that I can see its exact color better and know that I've selected it.

billyp-rva

It's always struck me as odd how there are so many off-white colors in HTML/CSS compared to the rest of the space.

layer8

That’s because standard RGB is linear while human perception is closer to logarithmic.

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kazinator

Because there are so many off white colors in wall paint.

PaulHoule

You mean all the low-saturation colors you see around the diagonal?

tocs3

I think that is hat was meant and I wonder about that also.

Adding:

Looking some more I think it would be nice if the rotation could be stopped.

Labeling the axis would be nice also.

billyp-rva

When you switch the list to show just HTML/CSS colors, it's all the colors in the corner.

WillAdams

Vagaries of monitor technology and a lack of calibration/the difficulty of calibrating for lighter colours.

extraduder_ire

Neat seeing the different shapes the RGB space gets compressed into if you select a different colourspace on the bottom right.

jl6

Wait, does this not use the colornames.org dataset?

Peteragain

What is interesting to me is the blank spaces for various naming systems. Ornithologist's view (Ridgway) versus Japanese traditional. Reminds me of the discussion of the blue/green distinction by Kay etc al.