- That's pretty cool. In a similar but very different vein: A few years ago I took twenty years of daily satellite imagery and computed the mean color for countries and the world https://www.landshade.com/
But in doing that you really do notice how everything concerning colors is just a bit arbitrary. You get raw reflectances from a scientific sensor on a satellite with specific spectral bands and sensitivity within those bands. And then you try and map this scientific sensor to the sensor that is your eyes, to try and emulate what we would actually see if shot up into space.
There's some really cool science around that if you're a color nerd: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003442571...
- Landshade: Nice work. Would be cool to be able to find similar ones across the globe, compare selected country color profiles, etc.
- Yes, you could do a lot more with the data. The only other thing I did was a wordle style guessing game: https://guess.landshade.com
But the data is open source, so if you want to dig around my badly documented code and raw satellite data yourself, be my guest: https://github.com/jonasViehweger/LandShade/tree/main/data
- The web has its own storied color, albeit a tragic one. Rebecca Purple is a named CSS color, which was added in tribute to Eric Meyer's daughter, who very sadly passed away at a young age. That shade was her favorite color.
https://medium.com/@valgaze/the-hidden-purple-memorial-in-yo...
- When I learned of this it hit me at the time that the web is made of real people, built by real people.
- And, as usual, some of those people are more equal that others.
- For a word nerd exploration of how colours are defined in dictionaries, check out 'True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color' by Kory Stamper. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237693038-true-color
- Ooh, cool. Will check it out :-)
- Their VanDyke Brown looks more like a Burnt Sienna to my eyes, but that might just be my screen.
You may also enjoy the Chromatopia book : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40554590-chromatopia
The author produces a very nice range of oil colors under the Langridge brand in Melbourne, downunder... its nice to keep these artisanal practices alive.
Would be handy to have the standard pigment codes. Ive been gradually moving away from using heavy metals such as Cadmiums. Haven't found the perfect red, although Napthol Red PR170 and Pyrrole "Ferrari" Red PR254 are pretty close to primary for mixing from a limited palette.
Its really surprising how you can get gorgeous brick-red browns and deep purplish blacks from mixing a near primary red and primary blue.
- Here in Northern Europe there seems to be something of a renaissance of traditional linseed oil paints, both because of people being more environmentally conscious and wanting to avoid VOC's and microplastics, but also because there's plenty of scare stories of people rotting their houses after painting them with more modern but less breathable paints like the usual alkyds or acrylics.
Not saying it's not possible to be successful with the modern paints, but they demand a different style of construction that allows air to flow on the backside of the facade.
- This is the kind of note I was hoping for. Standard pigment codes (PR170, PR254 etc) are a good call and I wanted a proper Color Index field and this pushes it up the list. I will also take another look at the Van Dyke Brown swatch. You may be right that it reads too close to burnt sienna. Chromatopia looks like a lovely book and thanks for the Langridge pointer, glad those artisanal makers are still going.
- Searched for teal, couldn't find it ... mmmh.
- I wanted to check if the information on this page was correct. I started searching and found this site [0], which looks very similar. I thought it was made by the same person, but it's not. It's just another website designed using LLM.
One advantage of LLM is that you can quickly and easily generate a "pretty decent" website. However, there is a drawback, that there is a high chance that a page with a very similar design(and similar idea) already exists somewhere.
- The color display has some texture to it with slightly warying shades. Which one is now the bespoke color? And the AI slop is really offputting.
- > Most of what you can read about historical color on the web has been rewritten three or four times from the same Wikipedia paragraph, with the citations dropped along the way. What you are reading here is an attempt to put the citations back.
That implies the entries also are based on the Wikipedia paragraph, though I think the author means they do their own research. The entries I looked at list several high-quality entries in a bibliography at the bottom but don't cite any of the text. Also, I don't know who wrote these - do they have any idea what they are talking about? Is this LLM output?
If anonymity ever worked (almost never in scholarship), it may not work anymore due to LLMs.
- > Known generative-AI crawlers are disallowed in robots.txt. This is a research catalogue assembled from primary sources; it is not training data, and a model fine-tuned on these paragraphs would launder out exactly the part — the citations — that gives the prose its value.
This reads like distaste for LLMs - but generally website reads (and is designed as!) very LLMy.
- If the About page said who made it, i.e. if someone was putting their reputation on the line, I might be more receptive. But the website has enough LLM design tics to make me suspicious.
It's sad. I come to Hacker News to see cool stuff and when I click on a link and see something obviously put together by an LLM I feel like I've been tricked :(
- Fair hit and I should have done that from the start. There is a person behind this and the About page is now updated (https://storiedcolors.com/about). Short version: I'm a technical architect who painted as a kid, stopped for years, and started this to get back into it. I do use AI to draft the entries and I'm not going to pretend otherwise but I check every one against named, non-Wikipedia sources and cut what I cant source. You shouldn't take that on faith so the methodology and the citations are there to check and there's a corrections address when I get something wrong. I totally get the "put together by an LLM" reaction on how it felt. I'd rather try and earn the trust back than argue about it.
- Right?! It's a bummer when a nice-looking website is now a red flag. It's become part of my workflow now browsing the web to check the About/Contact page on a website immediately; if there's no real person behind the site, how can it be trusted?
- Apologies. Was taken with the names and stories. . . didn't read the about page. Guess my critical thinking was on the fritz. Seriously, learn a lot here and will try to do better.
- "One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison." is so Claude it hurts. :'D
- Yes. Why the heck do LLM's produce prose like this? It's de facto standard in the narration for all these slop videos drowning YouTube.
No human writes like this, so what is the training material that has taught LLM's that this is the way to write?
- They may have used LLMs to design the site but IMHO the content is fine and well-sourced. Example: https://storiedcolors.com/color/blaze-orange/
Even if LLMs were used to help, someone must have spent a lot of time on making it read well. At least that's how it feels like.
- Except on that page there's immediately a claim that isn't backed up by any of the citations, eg:
"The hunting-safety effect has been substantial. The non-fatal hunting accident rate in the United States fell substantially over the decades following blaze-orange adoption, with state hunter-safety data consistently identifying the orange mandate as a major contributor to that decline."
None of the sources have any national hunting accident data - there's a single link to data from New York, and nothing that would support the claim that state data "consistently" identifies anything...
- [dead]
- Why isn't my favorite color on the list: Unforeseeable Fuchsia?
- Does the background colour have a history too?
- There's no rebeccapurple.
- We'll get it by Friday.
- i do like the concept, though the blatantly claude-tinged "italicized word" visual language undermines the author's credibility w.r.t graphic design history imo
- Who cares. As if every website needs to be meticulously hand crafted. You mad at people that use css templates too?
- > Who cares?
I care. So do they.
- Sounds like gatekeeping to me. They have an interesting idea and story and probably aren't web devs. But you write it off because the design (the least important point of telling the story) doesn't match your sweaty purity test. If anything, these vibe coded projects are the new plain HTML or Angelfire sites that a lot of people here seem to pine for. No one is getting off of your lawn anytime soon. Whining about it is just fucking annoying.
- Agree except I think it actually fits the content of the page. Seems like a natural fit.
- Terrible AI prose
- This webpage is nonsense.
First example I saw was already wrong. COBALT BLUE is not known since 1830 but its ANCIENT.
This webpage is some low effort english centric world and wrong and probably just AI slop.
