
Nippon Colors - Brajeshwar
https://nipponcolors.com
======
waffletower
This is a beautiful looking site but is decidedly designed for Japanese
readers. I will leave cultural commentary aside. While the romanized names are
large, they are incredibly awkward to read being rendered vertically with
rotation. I would recommend rendering the romanji vertically without rotation
or using a Western left-to-right rendering. While I have some rudimentary
Japanese reading skills, lack of furigana above the kanji color names further
limits the readability.

~~~
dragonwriter
> This is a beautiful looking site but is decidedly designed for Japanese
> readers.

Well, yeah, it's a site in Japanese with specifically Japanese subject matter,
why is that a problem?

> I will leave cultural commentary aside. While the romanized names are large,
> they are incredibly awkward to read being rendered vertically with rotation

IMO, vertically-with-rotation is fine, probably even ideal, for reading the
romanized text given the rest of the design, which presumably is appropriate
for the main target audience.

The only real readability problem I see is that the text color doesn't change
for contrast with the background color.

> I would recommend rendering the romanji vertically without rotation

Please don't. Consistently rotated context is easier to read as words than
vertical words of horizontal letters.

> or using a Western left-to-right rendering

That's done for the Romanized text where space permits (e.g., for the selected
color in the right-side banner.) But unless you are suggesting that the site
should be designed _first and foremost_ for Westerners, I don't see any more
of that as reasonable.

~~~
hattori31
> Well, yeah, it's a site in Japanese with specifically Japanese subject
> matter, why is that a problem?

people in the English speaking world forget that not everything is optimized
for them.

~~~
masukomi
> people in the English speaking world forget that not everything is optimized
> for them.

people everywhere forget that not only are there people who process things
differently than them, but that on the web we have the technology to
accommodate most of those needs.

In this case the whole thing could be rotated one way for folks with their
browsers set to a language that is traditionally vertical and another way for
folks where their browsers are left-to-right languages, and rotated and
flipped for folks with right-to-left languages.

------
duxup
Um... can someone explain a bit what I'm looking at?

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
It's a long list of Japanese color names with accompanying RGB values. Some
are well known in Japan (sakura, nadeshiko), the vast majority are obscure.

They also use an off-the-wall half-Hepburn/half-wapuro romanization scheme
that's the virtual equivalent of nails on chalkboard if you care about this
sort of thing (CYOHSYUN 長春 etc).

~~~
earthboundkid
This drove me nuts when I lived in Japan. I can accept "zya". I prefer "ja".
GTFO with "jya".

~~~
cbracken
On the plus side, kunrei-shiki romanisation, which is the official government
style and has been standardised as ISO 3602, is in practice ignored even by
that Japanese government.

In terms of nails on blackboards, I ask that you bathe for a moment in the
exquisite splendour of the romanisation that is "Mt Huzi", Japan's highest
peak.

------
hnarn
This is not a well designed website. The names of the colors aren't even
searchable (because it's not actual text), and unless Japanese people read
roman letters differently than we do, letters rotated 90 degrees is awful for
readability and should never be used. Text color is also never adapted to
background color, pick "Sakura" for example and the white foreground text is
completely unreadable.

~~~
goodside
When Japanese text is written vertically, Roman letters (with the exception of
short acronyms) are indeed written with a 90-degree clockwise rotation. If you
were reading a novel in Japanese that contains a brief English quotation, you
would turn the book 90-degrees counterclockwise and then read it normally as
you would in English. Non-fiction or technical works where English quotations,
code examples, or mathematical formulas would be common are not usually
written vertically.

~~~
claudiawerner
As true as that may be, it's silly to be doing that with a lot of text on a
website, which is primarily viewed on a computer monitor (or phone, but most
people have auto-rotation on their phones enabled all the time anyway). When
every colour name has the English underneath it, it seems like this would be a
prime use case for left-to-right, not top-to-bottom.

~~~
goodside
Japanese readers don’t literally rotate the book unless it’s a long quotation.
For names or a quote of several words you just get used to reading rotated
text.

I’m not arguing this is a good design. The parent post said “... and unless
Japanese people read roman letters differently than we do...”, so I was
pointing out that, in this context, they do.

Tategaki (vertical script) is a traditional style and, anecdotally, younger
Japanese people find it harder to read than yokogaki (horizontal script).
Using tategaki on websites at all is unusual.

~~~
hattori31
> Tategaki (vertical script) is a traditional style and, anecdotally, younger
> Japanese people find it harder to read than yokogaki (horizontal script)

Hello from Japan. Searching in Japanese gives no result and I fail to
comprehend how is this even possible, given that almost everything is written
in tategaki. Where did you get this info?

~~~
goodside
I think I remembered reading it here:
[https://www.learnwitholiver.com/japanese/blog-
post-2](https://www.learnwitholiver.com/japanese/blog-post-2)

My mistake. Thanks for the correction.

------
hrktb
This is super cool.

It's interesting that a lot of color names listed here are pointing to actual
things. Just like in english we'd have the "orange" color backed by the
average color of oranges.

I also think they would only be used in phrases with the "xxxx color"
cosntruct, and not as we'd say "blue" or "green". For instance azuki is a
popular grain, so you'd say a shirt is "azuki color" and not just "azuki" IMO.
That makes is a bit of cheating, as then anything can be set as a color, for
instance "UPS color" or "post box color" or "Xbox death ring color".

But I guess our very history with naming colors is very ad hoc anyway.

~~~
klodolph
How is this cheating? When you go for a palette in English, you pick from
colors such as salmon, coral, wheat, eggplant, eggshell, etc.

Meanwhile, the construct “xxx color” in Japanese is used for very ordinary
colors like brown (tea color), gray (ash color), and yellow (uhhh… yellow
color).

~~~
the_pwner224
What I believe gp means by cheating is that a color name is not a new
construct, but just the name of a colored object with 'color; appended.
Whereas in English a color name becomes distinct from the object.

'Orange' is a color name, inspired by the fruit but now an independent name;
the Japanese cheating way would be calling it 'orange color,' referring to the
fruit - in this case orange is not a color name. In 2000 years even if oranges
are extinct or evolved out of existence we'll still be using 'orange' as a
color, but the Japanese will no longer call it 'orange color.'

~~~
klodolph
> What I believe gp means by cheating is that a color name is not a new
> construct, but just the name of a colored object with 'color; appended.
> Whereas in English a color name becomes distinct from the object.

The claim that the Japanese terms are somehow “not independent” from the
objects and would disappear if the objects disappeared smacks of armchair
linguistics to me. I could equally claim that women have fewer teeth than men
do, as Aristotle did. Apparently he never bothered to count them.

If you keep repeating the idea that the Japanese language is somehow
“cheating” whereas the English version is fundamentally different and
inventing whole new words that are now divorced from their original meaning, I
would like to see at least a small amount of reasoning or research to support
it. The claims just don’t make sense at face value.

There has been a _ton_ of research into the linguistics of color names.

And… if you are just trying to explain gp’s position rather than argue for it
yourself, please don’t do that.

~~~
hrktb
To clarify a bit, I didn't mean cheating in a much negative way.

Using physical goods as reference to color is the basic evolution for
everyone. As I understand it "blue" in english for instance was initially
pointing to a concrete thing (lead?) as well, but the words went through many
transitions isolating the world for the color from its original counterpart.

But I think in english the concepts still stay more separated, for instance
"rose" as a color has parted a lot from the common perception of an actual
rose's color. Or looking at Faber Castel's color chart for instance [1], pink
declinations are all defined relative to "pink", in contrast on the article's
chart we'll have declinations like Ume (plum), Sakura (cherry), Ichigo
(strawberry).

I am not saying one is better, or one is lazier.

[1] [https://www.faber-
castell.fr/produits/CrayondecouleurPolychr...](https://www.faber-
castell.fr/produits/CrayondecouleurPolychromosrougegéraniumclair/110121)

~~~
klodolph
> But I think in english the concepts still stay more separated, …

My question is, why do you think that? It sounds like an unfounded assertion
to me. I hear you _repeating claims_ but color names have been extensively
studied in linguistics, and you have direct access to Japanese dictionaries
and encyclopedias online, and you can type Japanese color names into Google
image search, so it _should_ be relatively easy to come up with even a small
bit of evidence.

> …for instance "rose" as a color has parted a lot from the common perception
> of an actual rose's color.

If you look up “rose color” in Japanese Wikipedia, you’ll see that it
specifically defines it as a shade between red and magenta, even though roses
come in many different shades (yellow, orange, white, cream, etc).

[https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%96%94%E8%96%87%E8%89%B2](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%96%94%E8%96%87%E8%89%B2)

The problem here is that I am not a Japanese speaker, but this seems to be
evidence that the term “rose color” is a specific color, and not a term that
means “the color of a rose”.

“Peach color” is also interesting.

[https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A1%83%E8%89%B2](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A1%83%E8%89%B2)

Unlike English, this color is not the color of a peach fruit. It is also not
the color of a peach blossom, despite the fact that “peach-blossom color” is
listed as a synonym. Instead, it is the color that fabric takes when dyed with
peach blossoms, but the practice of dyeing cloth with peach blossoms has
fallen out of usage. You will find a different set of colors if you do a
Google image search for 桃花 (peach blossom) and 桃花色 (peach blossom color). (You
may find some sexual material in your image search, so maybe don’t do the
search in the office.)

So the term “peach color” in Japanese refers to a specific shade of pink which
is divorced from its meaning.

I guess English isn’t special after all.

------
flareback
I have no idea what that site is about but the clicking the button on the
right making the stuff fly around the screen was pretty cool.

~~~
TehCorwiz
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system)

~~~
airstrike
Probably worth a submission on its own

------
Y3Jdg4
When I was a young'n hacking up little websites and personal projects 10 years
ago I would always refer to nipponcolors.com for color ideas. Glad to see it's
still online

------
reaperducer
"This site is optimized to Safari."

There's something I never thought I would see.

------
a_c
Having known perhaps less than 20 colours for my whole life, this collection
is eye popping. And the design of website is perfect too

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
You can find plenty of colour terms in English too, e.g.

"chartreuse", "puce", "plum", " Burnt umber"

~~~
DonaldFisk
In addition to those, paint manufacturers have a name for every shade in their
range, which might vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. Magnolia is well-
known, but there are literally hundreds of others. We once painted a wall bon
voyage. It was a light blue.

~~~
tomalpha
I remember painting my daughter's bedroom in A Whisper Of Rodeo Drive.

Which was also a light blue. Possibly light purple. Ish.

Where do they come up with these names?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Where do they come up with these names?

The Marketing Department. Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

------
fenomas
I think the many comments griping about this site's
layout/readability/accessibility are missing the fact that it was made in
_2010_ \- a time when HTML5 was relatively new, many modern web features
didn't exist yet, and Flash was very much the norm for artsy dynamic sites
like this.

As such, judge it for what it is - an art site trying to push the bounds of
HTML at the time. It clearly wasn't made to maximize readability, and folks
complaining about the color names not being searchable are hugely missing the
point.

------
sdrothrock
I actually prefer this instagram account:
[https://www.instagram.com/nipponnoiro/](https://www.instagram.com/nipponnoiro/)

It's the same concept, but one color for every day of the year. It's a lot
more browsable/readable, though it's not searchable at all and has no romaji.

------
jimmydef
I've always found it interesting that the Japanese use the character 赤
generically for the colour red but Chinese speakers use the character 紅. When
they both refer specifically to different shades and tones of red and speakers
of both languages would know the specific meaning of both characters.

------
ddoolin
A lot of them are named after tea. Is or was tea really that influential in
Japan, or is there just a strong correlation between tea and colors? I have
been to a tea market just once and I can only guess that color would be a
quick way to tell them apart since they all look similar.

~~~
kagevf
A datapoint: the word for brown in Japanese is literally "tea color" ... so
"tea" is commonly used to describe colors that resemble that of tea.

------
jvalencia
If you look at gofun,
([https://nipponcolors.com/#gofun](https://nipponcolors.com/#gofun)) it makes
you wonder why the text color doesn't change to black to maintain contrast.

------
polm23
Here's a version of the same colors (with no romaji or animation) that might
be easier to use.

[https://www.colordic.org/w](https://www.colordic.org/w)

------
cordite
May I please have localized left to right reading?

------
christiansakai
So many ideas for personal project names lol

------
voz_
The time to swap between colors is killing me. I want to move through them
quickly.

------
elmimmo
Color component coordinates are meaningless without an associated color space.

------
ww520
This is a cool site. The 3D rendering looks cool.

------
jansan
Fun fact: In Japan the bottom color of traffic lights is called blue (aoi),
not green (midori).

~~~
jacobush
Fun fact 2 - aoi and midori are not exactly blue and green.

Fun fact 3 - google for Russian blue color

~~~
aleksaxyz
I enjoyed Fun Fact 3 quite a bit.

------
ChrisArchitect
resubmit all good but (2010)

------
mdszy
Is "you have to twist your head 90 degrees" some kind of new web aesthetic I
haven't heard of?

~~~
TehCorwiz
Japanese text is commonly written either left-to-right or top-to-bottom.
You'll see top-to-bottom most often in newsprint or manga.

After clicking on the little 'person' icon in the lower right of the control
you're taken to the author's personal site I assume. The site seems to
indicate that they're either located in Japan or natively Japanese.

In this case the Japanese text is correctly oriented, however the English text
is rotated 90 degrees as a result. Since they author is probably aiming for a
Japanese audience this doesn't come off as odd.

~~~
mrob
It looks odd to me because the individual English characters are rotated.
Vertical Japanese text doesn't rotate the characters.

~~~
Grue3
When English phrases are interspersed in vertical Japanese text (for example
within magazine articles) they're often rotated.

