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  • I've recently used two decades of satellite data to compute average colors for land-cover types (like average forest color or average water color).

    If you want to extend your color naming game by being able to say: This looks like Afghanistan-Water, or this looks like Ecuador-Forest

    Page is here: https://landshade.com

    by jcattle
  • What coordinate in the space is furthest from any named color? It looks like there are some relatively large voids in the blue/purple boundary area but it’s hard to say.
    by phdelightful
  • You can choose other color spaces here which is neat and helps visualize this a bit more accurately.
    by adzm
  • Here's the list of colors it works off of: https://github.com/meodai/color-names/blob/main/src/colornam...

    I'm trying to figure it out.

    by madcaptenor
  • perceptual distance is quite different from Euclidean distance in this RGB space. Like if put two swaths of color side by side and said “how similar are these?” to samples of people, the groupings would not much resemble this cube.

    They’ve done this! It’s shown on a “chromaticity diagram”, and is useful for comparing what colors different screens/printers/etc can reproduce. (It’s 2D not 3D cause it’s normalized for luminance or brightness.) Color science is weirdly fascinating:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space?wprov=sfti1#

    by turtletontine
  • Is the initial setting (Color Name List) a list of ALL the colors in each "sub" category listed in the drop menu?

    If so, would it be possible to put a "namespace" in front (like html.violet, or html::violet). That way you see which source it's from? That way you know where it's from (though I realize this may cause multiple "hits" on the same value/name) Or perhaps same names have different values.

    Either way, pretty cool. I agree, it would be nice to have a button or mode to stop spinning without having to hack it manually.

    by wormius
  • No they are separate lists. "All Color Names" comes from: https://github.com/meodai/color-names
    by meodai
  • Neat, inspired me to make an immersive version (in WebXR) limited to named colors in HTML (140) so here is a 18s video https://video.benetou.fr/w/rugsEB2sSbqgixNm2QjumH

    11 lines of JavaScript thanks to AFrame, threejs and some of my own tinkering :

      fetch('colors.json').then( res => res.json() ).then( colors => {
  colors.map( c => {
  let boxEl = document.createElement("a-box")
  boxEl.id = 'color_'+c.name
  let [r,g,b] = c.rgb.replace('RGB(','').replace(')','').split(',').map( n => Number(n)/100 )
  let pos = `${1-r} ${0.5+g} ${-0.5-b}`
  boxEl.setAttribute("position", pos)
  boxEl.initialPosition = pos
  boxEl.setAttribute("scale", ".1 .1 .1")
  boxEl.setAttribute("color", c.name)
  boxEl.setAttribute("target", "")
  boxEl.setAttribute("onpicked", "setFeedbackHUD('color'+selectedElements.at(-1).element.getAttribute('color'))" )
  boxEl.setAttribute("onreleased", "let el = selectedElements.at(-1).element; el.setAttribute('position',el.initialPosition)" )
  AFRAME.scenes[0].appendChild(boxEl)
  }) // end of fetch()
    by utopiah
  • Great project! It's visually dazzling and it really drives home the sheer size of the universe(s) of named colors.

    I've long been interested in the names of colors and their associations. If I may plug my own site a bit, check out the "color thesaurus" feature on OneLook that organizes color names more linearly. Start with mauve, as an example: https://onelook.com/?w=mauve&colors=1 (It also lets you see the words evoked by the color and vice versa, which was a fun LLM-driven analysis.)

    by dougb5
  • And how far things have come since the X11 color names
    by Tempest1981
  • I am the creator of the 3d thing that was shared. I am very interested in collaborating on something. Is the data you used for it accessible somewhere?
    by meodai
  • Neat!

    Feature request: I want the name of the color I'm hovering over to pop up next to the color. I don't want to have to look in the top left to see the name, especially with the board spinning. Also, I want the specific circle I'm hovering over to get a bit bigger so that I can see its exact color better and know that I've selected it.

    by CobrastanJorji
  • It's always struck me as odd how there are so many off-white colors in HTML/CSS compared to the rest of the space.
    by billyp-rva
  • Vagaries of monitor technology and a lack of calibration/the difficulty of calibrating for lighter colours.
    by WillAdams
  • You mean all the low-saturation colors you see around the diagonal?
    by PaulHoule
  • Because there are so many off white colors in wall paint.
    by kazinator
  • That’s because standard RGB is linear while human perception is closer to logarithmic.
    by layer8
  • Very clearly shows much more sensitive our eyes are to luminance rather than hue or saturation, which was the main observation that allowed for the high compression rate of JPEG
    by kouru225
  • Are you speaking of chroma subsampling, or is there a property of the discrete cosine transform that makes it more effective on luma rather than chroma?
    by dinkelberg
  • I use a similar app called Name That Color — https://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#6195ED

    I like sharing descriptive names with designers instead of naming everything "light blue" "dark blue" "not quite as light but still not dark blue" etc.

    This new thing is tons of fun but seems a bit less practically useful.

    by Eric_WVGG
  • You just reminded me that my app turned 18 a few months ago.

    Another dev, Daniel Flück, extended the app to help color blind users: https://www.color-blindness.com/color-name-hue/

    by chime
  • I originally made this about 8 years ago just for myself: to see where the color name list I maintain had gaps: https://github.com/meodai/color-names

    As I learned more about color models, I kept adding different ones over time. The perceptual models helped me understand the “missing” areas much better.

    Later, after building an API around the list (https://github.com/meodai/color-name-api ), I started including other lists with permissive licenses too.

    Appreciate all the thoughts and feedback here. I’ve also changed it so the cube stops spinning once you interact with it.

    by meodai
  • Wish there was a way to make it stop spinning, it's practically impossible to figure out adjacent colors because everything keeps moving no matter what you do. Perhaps there is a way, but I didn't find it?
    by Etheryte
  • Same. So annoying.
    by whatsupdog
  • I changed it: as soon as you interact with it, it stops spinning
    by meodai
  • https://codepen.io/graypegg/full/XJXoxYB

    Only change is lines 421 + 422 that sloooowly rotated the cube are commented out in the javascript, otherwise should act the same!

    by graypegg
  • RGB is a color model[1], not a color space[2].

    Note that the headline gets this wrong but the page linked to gets this right.

    sRGB or Rec2020 or ACEScg etc. are color spaces with known primaries and a known whitepoint. This is not nit-picky. Almost everyone doing CGI for the first time w/o reading up on some theory beforehand gets this wrong (because of gamma and then premultiplication, usually in that order).

    Then there are color models which are also color spaces. CIE XYZ is an example.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_model

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space

    by virtualritz
  • thanks for brining that up. Its a fight I stoped fighting a long time ago...
    by meodai
  • Is this why there appears to be a quite distinct plane inside the cube? If we were looking at them in the colour space would it look more uniformly spread?
    by globular-toast
  • Not an expert but I'll drop my 2c

    Most of my career was somehow related to graphics programming and I always thought it's bit weird that most quantization algorithms were operating in RGB model despite the fact that it was designed for hardware, not so for faithful color manipulation.

    The easiest way to see that is to imagine a gradient between two colors and trying to make it in RGB. It doesn't seem right most of the time.

    If so, then why would we consider distance in 3D space between two colors as faithful representation of their likeness?

    Well, lo and behold, it's 2025 and everyone finally accepting LAB as the new standard. :)

    by zeroq