The Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination

https://www.wired.com/story/very-mathematical-history-perfect-color-combination/

62 27 7 years ago

For anyone who is very particular about their color schemes: I'd recommend checking out the base16 project [1]. It's a collection of well-maintained color schemes (including solarized) for basically every text editor and terminal emulator. It makes switching between different schemes very easy, and includes tools for keeping your editor colors in sync with your terminal.

[1] http://chriskempson.com/projects/base16/

java-man3• 7 years ago

I noticed it's more difficult to create a good light theme. The colors appear vibrant on a dark background, but things are very different on a white background: in order to have high contract text one needs to use dark colors of different colors, and it gets harder to tell the difference.

Do you know any good colors specifically for light themes?

Solarized family is too dark (for me, at least).

ericsoderstrom2• 7 years ago

I've never found a light color scheme I really liked either. Was using base16-ia-light for a little while though.

1996• 7 years ago

Agreed, but change the background to something lighter and solarized-light is not so bad.

Bonus: it's widely supported, so you only change one color

My suggestion is a light yellowish grey: BackgroundColour=236,231,225

Bonus of using light themes instead of dark themes: you can invert your colors at night. It is easy on your eyes, and the browser and the rest of the system also follow suit.

I recommanad to use NegativeScreen + a red matrix so everything is in shade of red.

orev5• 7 years ago

neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer

Oh my god. Really?! You have to be kidding me. This phrase means: the color of static - gray and moving with flecks of random color. It has always meant this and always will. It’s inexcusable that a Wired writer doesn’t know this.

Even TVs that show the blue screen still show static for a second before the blue kicks in. I simply don’t believe that anyone really doesn’t know what static looks like, and this blue sky myth is just some kind of in-joke.

java-man3• 7 years ago

he probably meant old school CRT, which did indeed had a bluish tint.

cannam2• 7 years ago

"I actually composed that first image with black and white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost painful" (https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-...) - so it was intended (even if not necessarily read) as grey static at the time. I always assumed the reference was to the sky being full of debris which reflected light, like a chaotic horizon-spanning disco ball.

orev5• 7 years ago

No, it did not mean blue or any kind of blue tint. He meant gray. And I can’t say that any CRT I saw had a tint towards any color specifically.

klint3• 7 years ago

Author of the article here. I never interpreted that opening line as referring to static, but to gray of a blank television screen. Otherwise why not write "the color of television static?"

cannam2• 7 years ago

At the time he was writing, TVs didn't know how to blank out between channels. They just broadcast the noise. Blank television screens (when the TV was on) hadn't been invented yet.

(edit: maybe that's not true, perhaps in 1984 TVs with plain blue between the channels did just about exist? I don't know, in the 80s I only had access to the sort of black-and-white TV that meant his image came across to me exactly the way he apparently intended it)

orev5• 7 years ago

Because he is weaving a picture with words. He always meant gray, as described here: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-...

The Sprawl is a dreary place; it makes no sense to start the book on a bright and sunshiney day with blue skies.

baking3• 7 years ago

I started programming on VT-100s, moved to the IBM monochome (green) and then amber screens (over-hyped in my opinion.) Younger guys and their EVGA monitors would program in yellow on magenta which I couldn't stand. But nothing is as bad for readability to my 60 year old eyes as all forms of gray on gray. Anyone trying to use a historical argument for this color scheme seems misguided to me.

sureaboutthis• 7 years ago

Same here. I do not understand the desire of these candy colors and what purpose they serve. Purportedly, it helps people find function or variable names but, in reality, it's just a blur of colors, each of which can mean multiple things.

Give me white on black any day. I do like bold or gray on certain properties but only if it can be consistent and it's rarely consistent.

kqr• 7 years ago

I agree so much. I always have to create my own colour scheme for this reason. I want almost everything to be white on black, or black on white, and then I have like three exceptions to that:

- source code comments are a slightly more dim gray and literal strings are a slightly more dim green, because they're characters that can look like code, but generally have no semantic meaning to the program; - structural keywords are an orangeish-brown to highlight the syntactical structure of the code; and - types belong to a different world than the syntax tree, so they are a contrasting blue.

That's it. I don't want any more than that.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

"When Apple introduced dark mode for MacOS, I thought it was cool," says Bir, the Virginia programmer and artist. "But I wish it was Solarized."

I’m not sure I understand what this means. Do they want UI elements to be Solarized?

weinzierl• 7 years ago

This is about the Solarized color scheme from Ethan Schoonover. This is the color scheme I use and love and am grateful to Ethan that he made it. That being said, "The Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination" is a stretch - a big stretch. For one thing, going by Ethan's own description of the selection process, there was not much math involved:

Schoonover talks a lot about the mathematical nature of his color selections, but he picked the starting colors, a blue and a yellow, for very personal reasons. The blue reminds him of his long standing thalassophobia, the fear of very deep water. And though he says he doesn't otherwise experience synesthesia—such as hearing colors or tasting words—the yellow invokes tastes and smells he associates with his childhood. "My parents are artists, I'm comfortable picking things for obscure reasons," he says.

For another thing, even if it was strictly based on a color circle, that wouldn't make it more "mathematical". The color circle of current fashion isn't much more than a historical accident and besides the basic order of the main colors there isn't much science behind it.

monokai_nl• 7 years ago

I like the idea of symmetry of Solarized. I know how much work goes into creating a balanced color scheme. One thing that’s super hard is to match the same perceived level of brightness across different hues, while also being aesthetically pleasing. To balance that out is a lot of work but ultimately leads to a more harmonious picture that’s easy to read. I gave it my best shot for https://www.monokai.pro

espeed• 7 years ago

Blue and Green for the Web in 1999!

https://www.nngroup.com/books/designing-web-usability/

techbio• 7 years ago

1. Read the article, entertain the premise.

2. Install solarized from github on IntelliJ

3. Realize the editor frame and the rest of the UI don't match.

4. Back out install.

5. Finally, conclude that I actually do not want all editors I use to have the same color scheme; the differences in appearance serve to cue my mind that each editor operates differently, does things in different ways, and I am already equipped with sufficient cognitive dissonance not to add another layer.

The Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination

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