
Colorbox by Lyft Design - Liriel
https://www.colorbox.io/
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merricksb
Discussed yesterday (different URL):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800718)
(58 points, 9 comments)

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jacobolus
Cute, but people need to stop using HSL and similar color models for this kind
of thing. It is horrifically bad for it, designed by software researchers in
the 1970s who had very slow computers and as far as I can tell little
background in color vision, color reproduction, visual art, or graphic design,
and then passed down through the generations with very little thought along
the way.

A human being who is not already an expert should essentially never be looking
at numerical values of “R”, “G”, “B” or these trivially derived quantities of
“H”, “S”, “L”, “V”, etc. and trying to assign meaning to those numbers. It
just results in confusion.

A visual color picker interface (with no numbers involved) is pretty much the
only justifiable context where HSL or HSV ever makes sense. And arguably not
there either.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV#Disadvantages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV#Disadvantages)

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moontear
_people need to stop using HSL and similar color models for this kind of
thing_

What is your suggested alternative?

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jacobolus
Munsell, NCS, OSA-UCS, CIELAB, CIECAM02, CAM16, ICtCp, Jzazbz, ....

Pretty much anything designed by color experts from the past 100 years would
be better.

Here’s an implementation of CAM16 I was making today,
[https://observablehq.com/@jrus/cam16](https://observablehq.com/@jrus/cam16)

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asutekku
Okay this is pretty neat. I tried to create an palette that doesn’t work well
together but from what i have tried it seems almost impossible. I’m honestly
amazed! Great work.

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dllu
An interesting read regarding gradients and color palettes is the concept of
perceptual uniformity.

1\. [http://www.hsluv.org/](http://www.hsluv.org/)

2\. [https://programmingdesignsystems.com/color/perceptually-
unif...](https://programmingdesignsystems.com/color/perceptually-uniform-
color-spaces/)

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avichalp
I am not a designer but can this thing help you pick colours for your UI if
you give it start and end colours and number of steps (ie how many colours you
want) ?

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jacobolus
If you want to pick colors for your UI, you should first design in grayscale,
then add color (while preserving the perceived lightness using a reasonable
color model like CIELAB or CIECAM02 or ...).

This tool is likely to create confusion and yield poor results in the hands of
someone who isn’t already an expert (either through studying human vision or
long practice as a visual artist), because the numerical values sound
important and technical, but in the HSL color model are actually rather
arbitrary and unrelated to human vision.

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avichalp
Thanks for answering.

> This tool is likely to create confusion and yield poor results in the hands
> of someone who isn’t already an expert (either through studying human vision
> or long practice as a visual artist)

Where can I study human vision. Could you point me to some books/ resources ?

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jacobolus
[https://www.handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html](https://www.handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html)

