

Colourlovers (YC W10) Mixes With ColorSchemer And Adds To Twitter’s Palette - aepstein
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/22/colourlovers-mixes-with-colorschemer-added-to-twitters-design-palette/

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jacobolus
I must admit, while the community aspect is neat, I find all these tools for
creating color schemes (like “ColorSchemer”) pretty uninspiring. Every one
I’ve seen has a pretty artificially inflexible interface, and most are based
on device-oriented models of color, rather than anything based on (these days
quite advanced) scientific understanding of human color perception; basically,
they ignore most everything that color scientists have learned in the last
century of research. Few seem to have any particularly insightful or
interesting interface ideas either. Adobe’s Kuler is kind of neat, but it too
fetishizes these nearly completely arbitrary (w/r/t perception) relations, in
its definitions of various color scheme “types”.

Alas.

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dariusmonsef
Hey J.

Any specific requests on what you would like to see in a color scheme app? It
seems you have some knowledge in the color science space and we'd love hear
your ideas.

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jacobolus
Sure. First, a big part of the point of a color scheme interface is to be able
to orient and relate the colors in the scheme, but that’s only very useful in
a perceptually relevant model such as Munsell’s, CIELAB, or CIECAM02.

The best analogy I’ve thought of is to the interface of a sink or shower. If
you have two knobs for adjusting amounts of hot and cold water, then changing
either temperature or pressure requires adjusting both. Given that there’s
pretty much no situation in which you just want to make adjustments in
precisely the way that one of your hot/cold knobs accomplishes, the interface
ends up not being particularly intuitive (of course, since there’s feedback,
you can still get where you want without too much trouble, just like in color;
but the dimensions of adjustment end up being incidental rather than
instrumental). Saving records of “hot 10, cold 6” or whatever are less useful
than “pressure 16, temperature 5/8" would be (these numbers are made up; even
better would be pressure «foo» pascals, temperature «bar» degrees).

The color dimension most important for perception of fine detail, for instance
in making text readable against a background, or spatially identifying
patterns in data, is “lightness”, the perception of which is pretty well
modeled by Munsell value, CIELAB L*, or CIECAM02 J.

If you’re committed to making great color tools and can take some math, I
recommend reading Mark Fairchild’s book Color Appearance Models; it has great
material about human color vision generally, and is the best up-to-date color
science textbook I know of. Especially w/r/t uses like cartography/information
design, you might take a look at some of Cynthia Brewer’s work (here’s a
presentation to the ASA
<http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorSch/ASApaper.html> which has a nice
bibliography at the end). Here’s an IBM page on roughly the same
subject:<http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/lloydt/color/color.HTM> . As
ever, Edward Tufe’s books are wonderful. Envisioning Information has a part
about color. Tufte himself recommends this book:
<http://books.google.com/books?id=cVy1Ms43fFYC> but I don’t know anything
about it beyond the title. Bruce MacEvoy’s handprint website has great
explanations, but is long enough to maybe be a bit overwhelming
<http://www.handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html> .

For learning about the historical use of color in art, and our changing
understanding of it, John Gage’s book Color and Culture is just lovely.
<http://books.google.com/books?id=oq_GtjmoTNgC>

I spent a bunch of time recently re-writing
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV> which hopefully explains why these
models shouldn’t be the basis of this sort of tool. :-)

\----

As for my own specific interface ideas: I’ve thought a lot about it, but to
really flesh them out will just require building my own tools and iterating.
I’ve wanted to for quite a while; hopefully it’ll happen sometime. (Beyond
color/color scheme pickers, I really want to work on tools for adjustment of
color in photographs, since the ones offered by, e.g. Photoshop, do very
little of what I want them to.)

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dariusmonsef
If you'd like to see what happens when you mix Paul Graham and COLOURlovers...
Check out:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/dariusmonsef/4378029120/in/set-...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/dariusmonsef/4378029120/in/set-72157623358898141/)

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chime
This is awesome news! I didn't know COLOURLovers was working with Y/pg. Btw,
this is Chirag from <http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/>

Keep up the great work Darius. Let me know if there's any way I can help with
your projects. I love colors :)

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andrewcooke
how well does "the general public" get the idea that colour alone is worth
thinking about? won't this suffer from being perceived as an "incomplete
design place"? or is the idea that there's a niche for customizing sites (like
twitter) where all you can really change are (css) colours and background
images?

