
Show HN: Experimental “Text-To-Color” engine I wrote for fun - TheBerkin
http://berkin.me/colors
======
buro9
I tried vermilion and got nothing, so googled to check my spelling was correct
and came across Wikipedia colour descriptions:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermilion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermilion)

You might wish to make the corpus self-expanding, and for a given word do
Wikipedia (or other source) lookups to see whether structured information on
the colour exists.

There are whole lists of colours on there:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors:_A%E2%80%93F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors:_A%E2%80%93F)

Of course, it would require the addition of attribution for wherever you
obtained the data.

Oh, and welcome to subjectivity... battleship grey, it's changed over the
years but the commonly accepted one is the WW2 era grey which featured a touch
more blue and is RAL 7031 (
[http://www.ralcolor.com/](http://www.ralcolor.com/) \- which btw, is another
source ).

PS: And it doesn't know the difference between blood and dried blood.

~~~
gopowerranger
It doesn't know chartreuse. Well, OK, but it doesn't know lime or lemon
either.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
aqua, no aquamarine.

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syllogism
A quick idea to improve coverage using word vectors, with my NLP library spaCy
( [http://spacy.io](http://spacy.io) ):

[https://gist.github.com/honnibal/664cf54cb30c48c0c977](https://gist.github.com/honnibal/664cf54cb30c48c0c977)

Example output: aquamarine umber turquoise red-orange coppery malachite ochre
russet blue-violet fuchsia butterscotch lilac tortoiseshell mother-of-pearl

I thought it'd be fun to see whether I could get the shade of the color from
the vectors, but so far no luck. Probably vectors trained for image captioning
would work, though.

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StringyBob
Could this use [http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-
results/](http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/) as a dataset
to turn text-to-color?

~~~
TheBerkin
This was actually the inspiration for the project.

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onion2k
I typed "Cerulean" (a shade of blue) and didn't get anything.

~~~
TheBerkin
I've never heard that word before in my life. Will add!

~~~
comboy
You could try to automate, get some images from a search engine for given
phrase and try to average the color.

I would probably do an average and then for each image cut off say 20% colors
that are most away from the average, and then average that.

~~~
TheBerkin
That's a cool idea, though I don't know any search engine APIs that don't have
a ton of restrictions on them. Google used to have a wonderful image search
API, but it's either deprecated/discontinued by now.

I'll keep looking around, though.

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chanux
Shameless plug: Nothing like this but something I made that spews colors
according to text. You can play with it for 12 seconds and forget it :)

[https://github.com/chanux/summershades](https://github.com/chanux/summershades)

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petercooper
Apologies if this causes any offence, but I was intrigued to find "semen" and
"jizz" result in two different colors. I suspect investigating similar
differences would be a way to reverse engineer the technique.

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design
I have a similar engine up at
[http://joelcalifa.com/colors](http://joelcalifa.com/colors)

Mine can also do colors like "banana" or "bubblegum". Pretty simple to put
together actually. Rather than manually putting together a list of colors, I
just use the ColourLovers API. You can also use up and down arrows to move
between results or the return key to "make a poem," which I fully agree was a
weird feature to add.

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tux21b
"evil minions" are not yellow. Did you know that? :D

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Bill_Dimm
Neat. It would be helpful if you could go in the opposite direction (enter RGB
values and get the name of the closest color). I find that when I'm making a
chart or graph and I cook up some color in GIMP, I don't know how to refer to
that color in the text of the document that references the chart.

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Gys
Or you could try to relate text to emotion and then the emotion to color.

If speech to text is more evolving this project could constantly display a
color to express the emotion of people. Very expressive and cool, I think.

Needs some research, yes :-) But I am pretty sure that if you crack this, its
something you can make good money from.

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sinaa
Would be great if you could add an auto-complete on the supported keywords.

This way the user could explore and not get disappointed if his/her keywords
aren't supported.

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motyar
Check a very simple one
[http://output.jsbin.com/vufetemozi](http://output.jsbin.com/vufetemozi)

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puredemo
No taupe? No periwinkle? Teal isn't teal? Pls.

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Aardwolf
Would be cool to support other spoken languages too, or otherwise if it
doesn't recognize a word, take the nearest word it knows :)

~~~
TheBerkin
Great idea. I only speak English and (some) German, but I'll see what I can do
to accommodate color names in other popular languages.

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fit2rule
I tried my standard 'goto' for color tests: "baby shit".

WTF, it worked?! Amazing.

~~~
TheBerkin
The modifiers are abundant. Also try the "dog", "alien", "old", "dark", and
"rotten" varieties. That's just scratching the surface.

Those modifiers work on any other base colors, as well. They even stack. Want
"old dog shit"? I have just what you need.

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Yver
I expected something that would extract a color off Google Images in the
background.

~~~
TheBerkin
That was the plan at first, but I wanted even oddly specific requests to
return something somewhat reasonable, so I went with a word analysis method
that associates certain words with filters that are added from right to left.

Not nearly as neat or all-encompassing as something like what you describe,
but it does allow me a bit more control over how different words affect the
output.

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sakopov
Tried "shit" and got exactly the color I expected lmao. Cool project.

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jbrooksuk
Beige doesn't work.

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jordank
Cool idea. Tried Crimson and Sage but didn't see results

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iamthepieman
didn't get chartreuse, tangerine or rust

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svram
nice, maybe users can submit a word, say "fucked up" and a related color value
to add to your database

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GnarfGnarf
Still can't handle "ochre".

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hendekagon
"the complement of red" \- red

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magic_beans
Chartreuse isn't there...

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yusufu
At least poo works.

