A Visualization of the Rgb Space Covered by Named Colors

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.

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.)

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.

I guess there exist multiple names for the same colors, per https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_colors.php, and for some reason "Aqua" takes precendence in this display.

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

I saw a BBC? documentary about this years ago and it showed how some cultures had the ability to clearly identify different colours where I couldn't see any difference.

It turns out that knowing subtle differences in colours can have a strong impact on your daily life, so cultures pick unique parts of the colour spectrum to assign names to.

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()

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.

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

I've been researching the way classic Macs quantize colors to limited palettes:

https://rezmason.net/retrospectrum/color-cube

This cube is the "inverse table" used to map colors to a palette. The animated regions are tints and shades of pure red, green, and blue. Ideally, this cube would be a voronoi diagram, but that would be prohibitively expensive for Macs of the late eighties. Instead, they mapped the palette colors to indices into the table, and expanded the regions assigned to those colors via a simultaneous flood fill, like if you clicked the Paint Bucket tool with multiple colors in multiple places at the same time. Except in 3D.

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.