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Comments (83)

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  montroser
  > In Cellpond, I handpicked hexadecimal values for each channel so that the resultant colours would better fit my app's theme and needs.Well, this is an admission that trying to balance "wiggle room" without too much "fussing" with 1000 colors didn't really work.Evenly sampled in rgb space, a 1000 color palette yields neither enough flexibility (especially in the blacks, greys, whites), nor enough constraint to really make it dead simple.For app development at least -- choose 20 gradations of blackish to whiteish; 8 gradations of an accent color and so too for a couple of secondary colors...and you're good. That's like 48 colors instead of 1000.
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  amelius
  We already have 3-digit hex colors, e.g. #fff is white.I don't see the point of using decimals here. You only lose resolution.
• itishappy
  More art than spec. I can dig it.I have always appreciated the concept of thinking of colors as a cube (even though I now view them as triangles or weird pyramid things). Thinking of cubes as a 10x10x10 cube composed of 1000 smaller cubes is another mental model I've returned to often. I actually kinda like this for hacking on stuff like terminal colors.
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  graypegg
  I get the concept, but I have a feeling this might not be any more comprehensible when picking a colour than other additive colour codes with a fixed range and components.It would be neat if you could express colours as a mix of arbitrary base colours, kind of like you’re mixing it on a paint palette. (ROYGBIVWK maybe? K being Key/blacK)r2b1 gets you a deep reddish purple, but if you want it to be lighter you just keep adding white, r2b1w1, r2b1w2 etc. You can just focus on chroma, and mix in white/black to futz with the saturation/lightness. I feel like that’s a bit more like the way people talk about colours. (Pale yellowish-green = y1g2w2, dark blueish-grey = b1w2k4)The way paint colours blend gets a bit complex compared to mathematically perfect RGB light sources, and there’s obviously MANY ways to represent the exact same colour, so not a silver bullet by any means.
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  zokier
  or you could use 3-digit octal (so 000-777) for a 512 color palette, which arguably would be even more simple. as a bonus you can use it to color file permissions :)
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  smilekzs
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colorsMacromedia Flash taught me this in the early 2000s...
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  Vvector
  Isn't this just RGB, with 246 of the 256 values removed from each channel?
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  qubex
  As somebody who works in the coatings industry and is aware of the extremely complex field of colorimetry this horrifies me.
• throawayonthe
  todepond can't stop winning
• warumdarum
  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.
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  techguy916
  This is amazing work, but I am unsure how it helps, hex-codes were doing the trick right?
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  dist-epoch
  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...
• anon
  undefined
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  trumpdong
  So it's just hex colors but... not hex
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  mock-possum
  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.
• anon
  undefined
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  humbugtheman
  oh berd
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  dudeinjapan
  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?
• hackernulls
  [flagged]