Splash Is a Colour Format

18 points by tobr 2 days ago | 17 comments

qubex 34 minutes ago |

As somebody who works in the coatings industry and is aware of the extremely complex field of colorimetry this horrifies me.

warumdarum 2 hours ago |

Mega Splash is the same format but with a unique curve annotation in the 4th digit. And i just made that up and its nelievsble because all encoding schemes are wonky and are extended on a per usecase basis.

smilekzs 1 hour ago |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors

Macromedia Flash taught me this in the early 2000s...

Vvector 2 hours ago |

Isn't this just RGB, with 246 of the 256 values removed from each channel?

Sharlin 2 hours ago | |

The point is that quantizing the range makes it easier for humans to choose colors. But there's already the #ABC hex format, which while less intuitive to non-techies has the huge advantage of being well-established.

tptacek 46 minutes ago | | |

But it doesn't make it easier for humans to choose colors. For a specific list of detent colors, it reduces the amount you have to memorize relative to full RGB. But to actually reason about colors, you want a non-arbitrary scale; HSV (for instance) gives you hue direction and then you can slide saturation and brightness around.

Scaevolus 44 minutes ago | |

It's rgb with 3.3 bits per channel, basically 10 bit per pixel color (256 colors is 8bpp).

tptacek 2 hours ago | |

My other question here is, are "R", "G", and "B" channels the best way to reason about color? Isn't HSV more intuitive?

cardamomo 2 hours ago | | |

Or HCL? Or LAB? Any of these are more intuitive than RGB.

dist-epoch 1 hour ago |

Whenever I needed a color for something digital (website, ...) I would use the Pantone color picker in Photoshop. It had multiple lists of colors (some more vivid, some muted, some thematic - only reds) and I would browse the color I wanted to pick a suitable shade.

I didn't need the Pantone aspect specifically (real world printing), these were strictly digital uses, but I found browsing shade lists much better than trying to use a regular analog color picker (RGB, HSV, ...). Maybe because you see a large color swatch, maybe because seeing 10 different shades at once is and choosing is faster then randomly moving the mouse through the analog picker.

Screenshot: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/how-to-find-and-add-pantone-co...

mock-possum 1 hour ago |

I feel like I kind of get the spirit that this is done in, but it’s just not for me. Abstracting away from the existing 6 digit hex color codes just seems like extra work, even though it’s presented as ‘simplifying.’ It may just be too late for me - I’ve already learned how to express color sufficiently by mixing 256 levels of R, G, and B - it’s not useful to relearn how to abstract that to mixing 10 levels of the same, in a less exact less prescriptive manner.

I AM genuinely glad this person is having fun with the little world they’re creating, and that they’re bothering to share it.

dudeinjapan 2 hours ago |

The site doesn't explain--what's the actual point of this? If we are seriously concerned about characters (which is generally silly in a gzipped CSS) why not just use 3-char hex like #a5c?

Sharlin 2 hours ago | |

Avoiding analysis paralysis, making it more intuitive to manually write colors. But yeah, there doesn't seem to be any advantage over the well-established #ABC format than decimal digits being easier to non-techies.

justinator 2 hours ago | |

The point is to prove that one xkcd comic

qubex 33 minutes ago | | |

927

mock-possum 1 hour ago | |

No, TFA does very deliberately and openly explain what the goal/justification is:

> Splash colours can help you avoid decision paralysis when picking colours. It's an emotional tool that stops you fussing around— trying to pick the "perfect" colour … It also means the user can deal with discrete / individual colour values in the drag-and-drop user interface. They don't have to deal with large numbers at all. Only one to nine

qubex 31 minutes ago | | |

Ah so let’s avoid analysis paralysis by having only black, as Ford famously ruled for the Model T.

Of course that’s a reductio ad absurdum, but it’s also completely arbitrary to maintain that fewer options is better. The opposite is also equally arbitrary.