
Flat UI colors - ekpyrotic
http://flatuicolors.com
======
etfb
And here we see the ultimate extension of the web designer's aesthetic into
the realms of the absurd: colours, artfully chosen and arranged; a Flash (?)
interface allowing exactly one interaction, of utter triviality. And because
it would no doubt ruin the perfection of simplicity, _nothing_ to explain what
it's for, why it exists, what will happen if you click Reload, and so on. No
doubt part of the reason the site is being so hammered at the moment is
because people are reloading over and over, trying to make it do something
different.

Very odd indeed. And not the good kind of odd. Just odd.

~~~
__david__
It also doesn't seem to do anything. I click on stuff and it says "Copied!"
but there's nothing in my clipboard. Unless I'm not understanding what "copy"
means...

~~~
ahmetsulek
Can you tell me about your OS, Browser and Browser Version?

~~~
azar1
It doesn't work for me on Safari Version 6.0.4 (8536.29.13) with no Flash
installed on OS X Mountain Lion.

Javascript Console says: TypeError: 'undefined' is not an object (evaluating
'this.htmlBridge.style')

I'm guessing this is because I don't have flash installed.

~~~
ahmetsulek
Unfortunately it depends on Flash due to OS level copy functionality. Browsers
doesn't allow JavaScript to access copy functionality.

------
ChrisNorstrom
Haters gonna hate. I like it. Those are so similar to the colors I use, not
too saturated, not too dim, not too bright, not too loud. (And it's hard to
find a good yellow)

It's not made for the average person it's made for people who understand
design and don't need explanation. It's a micro-web-app. Click on the colors
to copy them to the clipboard. That's it.

Man, are you guys going to criticize him/her because they didn't have a call
to action button? There's a time and place for those things, and a time and
place for these micro-web-apps.

If you guys keep shitting all over people's side projects they're going to
stop posting them here. The goal is constructive criticism.

~~~
orclev
Good UX should be intuitive, if you've done it right you don't need to explain
what it does. The fact that so many people are utterly confused by this site
shows that clearly it wasn't done right. If it isn't intuitive that's fine, it
can still be good UX, so long as you add proper explanation, context, and
callouts to make it obvious what the various interactions are. This site is
neither obvious, nor does it have proper callouts to explain the interactions,
which is why everyone is so confused. In short, it's bad UX, on top of a tool
of questionable use to begin with. It's a single fixed color swatch. It would
make a nice component on a larger site, say one of the myriad ones that allow
you to select from a large collection of user submitted pallets, but as a
standalone it comes across as kind of a flop.

If you post something you've done here, it's because you think you've created
something others will find useful/interesting in some way. If it turns out
that most people don't that just means you were wrong about how
useful/interesting you expected it to be. You can do one of two things then,
either try to fix/improve your effort and re-submit it later on to hopefully
better result, or else abandon the idea and try to come up with something
better. Either one is fine. What you can't expect is that people will heap
praise on something they consider either boring, useless, or flawed in some
way. The fact that people are taking the time to call out any perceived flaws
is a service to the creator, its up to them to read others opinions, evaluate
them, and decide how they want to react to them (either by accepting them as
valid criticisms and working to fix it, or else rejecting them for whatever
reason).

Ultimately if your "side project" isn't in a state yet to be evaluated by a
large readership it probably shouldn't be posted here unless you're looking
for feedback on how to fix it. That's the purpose of a site like this, it's to
aggregate/discover interesting content, it isn't a dumping ground for every
half finished project on the internet. I've got dozens of "side projects" that
I'd never dream of posting here because frankly they aren't worth wasting
peoples time with.

~~~
forwardslash
Was the "Why?" link not there when you went to the site?

------
soulclap
What's with all the negativity on HN lately? Not getting the hate really. The
site looks good and the UI makes it feel like a game - fun to use and there's
not really a lot to 'figure out', come on. Useful or not and (design)
educational values aside, the creator enjoyed making it.

------
ahmetsulek
hey there, whether if you find it useful or not thank you for your interest
which led the site down :)

people at designmodo are aware of this project and actually they mentioned it
on their last blogpost <http://designmodo.com/flat-design-colors/>

it was not even a side project for me, the thing is I was obsessed with these
colors and started to use them a lot, and got bored of the copy - paste
progress. I did it because it was useful for me and I shared for those who
like the flat ui color as much as I do and I didn't know that it was going to
drew this much attention.

now moved a cloud server, hope DNS changes will affect soon.

at least it was fun to create some mini app mentioned in the hacker news :)

~~~
soulclap
Minor bug report: when I open the 'What da copy?!' dropdown at the top and
don't select anything but hover on a color, then hover on the second or third
item in the dropdown again (coming from below the dropdown), there's no
highlighting of the dropdown items and clicking selects the 'peter river'
color. Something to do with z-index maybe? I am using the latest Chrome beta.

Also: hovering on any of the colors in the bottom row brings up the vertical
scrollbar.

------
cateye
If a separate website with a separate domain name is going to be created for
every color palette (<http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes>), we might have to
speed up the ipv6 migration.

------
eksith
While I appreciate the effort that went into this (and keeping in mind that
taste is indeed a very subjective thing), I just don't feel comfortable with
this corralling of styles and colors. I get the impression that there's some
uniqueness, and maybe even a bit of quirkiness, lost when the web adopts a
uniform.

Which is probably why Geo exists : <http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/>

------
meerita
I wonder why they've used Flash. Flash is obsolete right now for these kind of
things. A waste of time, IMHO, specially if you want to do this kind of
simplicity UI and interaction, why the heck you will choose Flash over JS.

~~~
andygcook
Javascript doesn't have access to the clipboard, so the creator is using Zero
Clipboard, which utilizes Flash's ability to do one click copying:

<https://github.com/jonrohan/ZeroClipboard>

~~~
ahmetsulek
That is right. I don't like flash too.

------
ceeK
Coincidently I came across this a few hours ago from
<http://designmodo.com/flat-design-colors/> when looking for some quick and
easy flat colour palettes for an iOS application.

It is no doubt initially confusing, I clicked a colour but had no idea it had
copied to the clipboard. Furthermore when it wasn't apparent what the top drop
down menu actually did when you didn't know about the copying functionality.

Regardless, in the end I got the colours I wanted. Had no idea they were the
same colours as from the flat-ui package.

------
meerita
I still think making a website for just 1 style is a bit, useless. What if I
do just one website saying "Art Deco colors" featuring a miserable color
palette of 12 colors. It's just crap utility for any good designer.

I love colors, I personally own 6 o 7 color books with thousands color
patterns for working on specific designs. But this, this is just 1 color
palette and not the only one you can use on "flat designs".

Sorry but the website fails, show me thousands, not 1.

------
ianstormtaylor
The only colors I'd really recommend taking from this are Sunflower and the
Midnight blues. The greens and blues and purples are all too safe. They look
like defaults, like choosing "red" in CSS for one of your brand colors. Like
someone else in the comments said, they are "not too saturated, not too dim,
not too bright, not too loud". And although he used it as a compliment, it
sounds like a failure to me. You don't want all of your colors to live in the
same value and saturation spaces; that's boring.

Edit: The Pumpkin's interesting too.

------
bradhe
Can any designer out there speak to how these colors are chosen? It seems to
me that it'd be a matter of taste more than anything else, but if there is
some trick to choosing better palettes I'd love to hear it.

------
novax81
As someone who struggles with good color selection, this is amazing. Thanks.

------
seyz
Really useful, thanks!

~~~
Kiro
Useful for what?

~~~
unvs
For finding some nice colors to try in his/her flat designs I'd presume?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
But these are the exact same color swatches as are included in the Flat UI
package. Even the labels are the same.

I don’t see any added value.

<http://designmodo.github.io/Flat-UI/>

~~~
pizza
I guess it adds value for someone who doesn't know that Flat UI exists.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Someone shoot me.

------
yottabyte47
AKA "solid colors"

------
zancler
As a designer, this might just be the most stupid thing I've ever seen.

~~~
mistercow
That's a very unproductive and mean comment. If you have specific criticisms,
post them.

If you think your criticisms are so obvious that they don't need saying, then
don't say anything. If you think that, but the post stays on the front page,
well, you were wrong. The criticisms did need saying. So post them.

~~~
Evbn
Excellent criticism. Neutral tone, logical, accurate, specific.

------
toor
Sites down loll.

------
lampe3
this site has been hacked by hackernews (aka the site is down because of
hackernews) :D

EDIT: Working for me again

~~~
etfb
Used to be called the Slashdot effect; nowadays you see it more in reference
to Reddit. There should be a name for it that doesn't need to change every
time a new web link aggregator becomes flavour of the month.

Incidentally, whatever it's called, "hacked" is not the right terminology.
Whether you're of the belief that "hacker" means "programmer" or "evil nasty
person", this doesn't qualify for the term.

~~~
lampe3
it was just a joke nothing more... and the hacked was because of "hackernews"
and i know what hacker means ;)

~~~
etfb
Ah I see. Still, you got me thinking about the need for a general term for
that sort of hammering, so it's not all wasted.

~~~
buzzkillr2
general term: friendly dos

