Show HN: Colors Used by Popular Sites

http://paulhebertdesigns.com/web_colors/

by paulhebert • 10 years ago

179 38 10 years ago

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Hey Hacker News,

Hopefully this is the right place for this.

I made an interactive visualization showing the colors used by the ten most popular sites. The page also explains different color models and how to convert between them using math and javascript.

In the future I plan to use the tools I built here to do more interesting comparisons of color trends over time and between different cultures.

Any feedback is welcome. Thanks for looking!

EDIT: Here's the github link by the way: https://github.com/Paul-Hebert/web_colors

eekfuh• 10 years ago

I would like to see the colors sorted by hue

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Hey eekfuh,

If you scroll down a little further you'll see there are a few sections where they're organized by hue; once in a bar chart and once around a circle.

Let me know if you still can't find it and I'll try to explain more thoroughly or send you a screenshot.

Someone else mentioned they'd like to see the colors sorted by hue in the area where they're broken out by site. Maybe I'll update that section to be less random.

sb8244• 10 years ago

Not sure if I'm missing something, but the main Google logo colors aren't reflected in the Google section. Is this just HTML color codes rather than images. I guess the challenge in an image is that most aren't solid blocked text.

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Hey thanks for checking this out!

Right now my scraping script only pulls the HTML color codes and doesn't attempt to pull colors from images. Additionally, a color code could be present in the stylesheet but not actually used on the site.

I have some information about this and other caveats at the bottom, but I'll put an explanation closer to the top to avoid confusion.

Thanks!

arjie• 10 years ago

I think the pictures would be prettier if similar colours were together. Even straight Euclidean in RGB and then sorting will probably be good enough for this purpose, though you could probably get something fancy by using an actual colour difference metric.

The Google logo is missing, though. The green, certainly.

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Hey arjie,

Further down there are a few visualizations where colors are sorted by hue and saturation.

I'm debating whether or not to sort the initial visualizations in the same way.

Unfortunately my script doesn't currently pull colors from images, only CSS color codes. A couple people have been confused by this so I'll add more info about that at the top.

Thanks for the feedback!

adontz• 10 years ago

Looks like Internet is mostly blue.

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Yeah, it's interesting to see the color groupings that take place.

Next I want to do cultural comparisons. E.G. the ten most popular sites in China vs. the ten most popular in the U.S.A.

It would be interesting to see if it would still be all blue.

lucb1e• 10 years ago

I also see a lot of red though, and combined I'm still not sure those make a majority.

thekevan2• 10 years ago

I think the idea is extremely interesting but after seeing 2 of the caveats at the end, I didn't have nearly as much confidence in the data.

"3. If a color is found inside of a website's text it counts as being used. For example if the phrase "tan leather" is in a website's text, this scraper would say that the site uses tan. Additionally if the phrase "I understand" is in the text, it would still count as tan.

4. Colors added by external javascript are not included."

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Hey thekevan,

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that these are pretty major caveats. Hopefully you still found it interesting or useful.

This is my first public release of this visualization and I plan to keep improving it over time. If it were a traditional software project I would probably categorize it as 'beta.'

I've been spending a lot of time working on this in my free time and was curious whether it was something people would even be interested in.

Seeing the positive feedback on HN and other sites has inspired me to put a larger focus on solving these problems as well as adding new features. (Analytics are showing about 1500 people have viewed it since I began sharing it a couple hours ago. Thanks everyone!)

EDIT: up to around 4,500 hits as of 12:50 PST

cjwelborn• 10 years ago

I was wondering why Twitter would use the the colors 'red', 'Red', 'rEd', and 'reD'. I think thekevan's comment explains it though. :)

iLoch• 10 years ago

A different approach, if you wanted to do something more accurate (this is also a reasonable choice in my opinion, given that you have a fixed number of sites you're looking at) would be to use a headless browser like PhantomJS and traverse the rendered DOM checking the computed style with `window.getComputedStyle(el)`.

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Hey thekevan,

I've been busy between work and getting ready to move, but I had some free time today, so I sat down and resolved the first caveat you posted.

I modified my REGEX. I also updated my scraping method to parse the DOM and pull out attributes instead of running the regex on the full website text.

Anyways, thanks again for looking and commenting!

thekevan2• 10 years ago

Hey, glad you appreciate the comment and found it helpful. Nice improvement!

dynode3• 10 years ago

Paul, I made something similar - http://bardagjy.com/?p=1639

I had the same problem with Javascript so I used I used Selenium to drive Chrome to take a screencap of the page. Then I used K-Means clustering with EM to convert the pages to their constituent colors.

I scraped 100 and 1000 of the Alexa top 1M. Cool to see another approach, great work!

dynode3• 10 years ago

Replying to myself a quote from my article

"It’s easy to notice a bug when examining the colors for Google (note, this is normal google.com not a doodle). Notice how the three colors are light gray, dark gray, and white – not the typical red, green, blue, yellow color scheme. Why? Well, when the image screenshot is resized to 320 x 240 pixels for processing, the colors are dithered. The number of pixels in the new image that lie between red, green, blue, yellow and white – the dominant background color – is much larger than the number of pixels that are colored. Because of dithering, those between pixels are closer to shades of gray, than colors, and thus the k-means clustering (with EM) finds shades of gray and white to be the “color of Google”. I’m not sure if this is a bug.. what do you think?"

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Hey Andy,

That's awesome! I figured someone else must have had the same idea before me. :)

I think your screenshot scraping technique is probably more accurate than my text parsing. I also like that you used a larger sample size. I plan to experiment with groups of 100 and 1000.

Thanks for sharing! It's always interesting to see how different people achieve similar goals.

I'd like to begin scraping the images on the sites soon too. When I've got a good chunk of time I'll look through your source code for inspiration. Mind if I reach out with questions when I do?

EDIT: I also really enjoy those woodblock prints! Now I want to somehow print my data for the top ten sites onto canvas.

im4w1l• 10 years ago

Rather than resizing to 320x240, pick that number of pixels randomly. For even better results use some method of variance reduction e.g. divide the screen into n squarish rectangles and pick N/n pixels from every rectangle.

nmstoker• 10 years ago

I'd second using selenium / webdriver for this. You wouldn't need a great deal of code to get the raw pixel data.

The area I suspect will need thought is how one gives "value" to distinct colours. It's tempting the go by the amount of screen space taken up, but that ignores the way the eye and mind works - a red dash in a sea of another colour needs to respect the presence of the red as it could be critical. But then there are sections where the colours might be low in importance (eg colour of text in legal text from a footer)

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Yeah, that seems like a great option. I'm not sure how to get around the dithering bug that dynode ran into though. I'll have to do some research before I get started on V2

dbg31415• 10 years ago

* Spectrum - Chrome Web Store || https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegk...

Instantly test your web page with different types of color vision deficiency. Color Vision Deﬁciency (CVD) affects people’s ability to distinguish certain colors. Estimates indicate that approximately 200 million people worldwide are affected by some kind of CVD. Individuals of Northern European ancestry, as many as 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women experience the common form of red-green color blindness.
This extension helps you to test web pages for people with different types of CVD. It's particularly useful for websites with data visualisations, because some colors may not be distinguishable from other colors in the charts.
Flash enabled websites are also supported!

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

This is really interesting thanks!

It's interesting to see how the visualizations would render to the colorblind.

I also had no idea that 8% of Northern European men had red-green colorblindness. I assumed it was a lot lower than that.

Thanks for sharing! I'll definitely be incorporating this extension into my design process in the future.

nprescott• 10 years ago

I had a similar idea recently, originally I intended to try and identify "fashionable" color palettes, which worked pretty well: https://idle.nprescott.com/2016/scraping-color-palettes.html

and only later tried branching out to the 100 most popular sites: https://idle.nprescott.com/2016/image-capture-crawler.html

I tried ImageMagick's histogram functionality and a K-Means but wasn't happy with the results. I didn't finish doing a meaningful color extraction from the most popular sites because of difficulty getting (in my mind) representative samples from more complex images (like the linked GitHub homepage screenshot). I still intend on circling back at some point and trying a color quantization.

I hadn't thought to scrape the CSS colors directly, that's an interesting approach. I'd like to see the colors sorted in some way, to get a better sense of the range for each site.

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Hey Nolan,

Those are really cool. I think your palettes are a more useful representation than my 'data dump' strategy.

Another commenter used Selenium to get screenshots. I'll have to look into that as I update this.

Thanks for sharing!

_RPM• 10 years ago

Kind of off topic, but didn't anyone notice that FastMail pretty much copied Facebook's colors. I too remember using Facebook's colors when I first started learning how to do HTML, but didn't go forward with it.

niftich• 10 years ago

This reminds me of the article 'Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue' [1]. Even though the reasons behind movies and websites looking similar are different, it's interesting that both are heavy on blue and reddish-orange.

[1] https://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orang...

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Thanks for sharing! That was really interesting.

It kind of makes sense, at least for movies. Complementary color schemes with contrasting colors connect with humans on an intrinsic level. Since the sky is already blue and humans are slightly orange. (at least caucasians, who tend to be over-represented in Hollywood)

If blue and orange are already present in most scenes I understand the impulse to up that contrast.

SimeVidas• 10 years ago

But how does Alexa determine the most popular sites to begin with? I’ve never asked myself that.

Elrac2• 10 years ago

Site doesn't work for me. There's a blank rectangle below the "Sites" title and to the right of the site URLs.

Mousing over that area raises some white tool tips/pop-ups displaying color names/codes.

I found this an ironic coincidence with another recent post on HN:

"Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12477190

paulhebert16• 10 years ago

Hey Elrac,

Sorry to hear that. If you try reloading the page are you still having that issue?

Mind letting me know what browser/OS you're using?

Do you have javascript deactivated or any browser extensions running?

I read that article as well and enjoyed it.

In the future I'd like to move more of the visualization code server-side and rely on the end user's browser less.

Elrac2• 10 years ago

Hi Paul,

Sorry 'bout the late answer; I don't get emails on responses.

My browser is Firefox 45.3.0 running on Windows 7. I use Privacy Badger - that blocks sites that do too much cookie tracing but it didn't object to your page.

What may be more significant is that I browse through a corporate firewall - it sometimes fails to connect to the same host I connected through earlier, and sites which rely on consistent conversations sometimes fall victim to this.

All that said, frustratingly, today I see colorful splotches. Whatever the problem was, it seems to have gone away.

I think that your idea to do more server-side rendering is praiseworthy. I'm very tired of the many Web sites whose authors seem to think they own my CPU.

Show HN: Colors Used by Popular Sites

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