Show HN: AI color palette generator for Tailwindcss

by manceraio • 6 years ago

209 52 6 years ago

So what exactly is AI about it? It just looks like a common algorithm that matches colors together and not some AI that has been trained to find matching color palettes.

laurensr• 6 years ago

The use of the term AI may generate funding ;-)

avery42• 6 years ago

According to the README [0] it's using neural networks:

It uses two neural networks to predict the full palette. The first, model.js it predicts all the shades vertically from 50-900 given a certain color as input. The second, nextModel.js predicts horizontally all the colors horizontally given a certain shade as input.

[0] https://github.com/dmarman/dmarman.github.io

hackerman1234692• 6 years ago

Yeah but if you look at the code it doesn't really predict anything on trained data etc.

It's not really a neural network either.

It will always return the same output for the same input. There are no training datasets etc.

It's literally just an algorithm that returns an output and returns the next output based on the previous output.

I would have expected some dataset of colors to train a model on and then use that to generate values but there really is no actual AI.

People seem to confuse a clever algorithm with AI.

There's nothing inherently intelligent about what it does. It's all math.

manceraio5• 6 years ago

It uses two neural networks trained with the original tailwind palette. Here is the GitHub page with more info:

https://github.com/dmarman/dmarman.github.io

sillysaurusx5• 6 years ago

It's effective, for one. I was surprised how good it looks. Color matching is a lot harder than it seems when you're generating palettes.

"AI" may seem cheesy, but you have to remember that in the future, lots of "AI programming" is just going to become "programming." This is clearly an effective, simple way of solving the problem, and requires no clever or common algorithms.

Also, what the hell is this file? Haha. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dmarman/dmarman.github.io/...

This is awesome. The model outputs were turned into a single line of javascript which then gets evaluated by multiplying the color against all the weights. That wasn't what I was expecting, and I'm totally stealing this technique.

manceraio5• 6 years ago

yep, this line of js was rendered using Brain.js

https://github.com/BrainJS/brain.js#standalone-function

kuu2• 6 years ago

Also, what the hell is this file? Haha. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dmarman/dmarman.github.io/....

I may be wrong, but it seems the weights of a trained NN

ggggtez• 6 years ago

gets evaluated by multiplying the color against all the weights. That wasn't what I was expecting

This is literally just the definition of a 1 layer neural network.

deltron30308• 6 years ago

These kind of palettes always struggle with brighter yellows like #ffe400 because of the necessary normalization across hues to make it a full palette in first place, which of course prevents some colors to fulfill their potential (which is often at their peak chromacity). No AI can solve this problem because it's how colors work.

I think it's best to keep the palette separate from the code (e.g. store palettes in an app like Sip), and not insist on the replaceability of colors across a range. E.g. instead of blue-500 use functional names like btn-color or brand-color and alias the colors that way in code.

sillysaurusx5• 6 years ago

AI can solve it better than normal code can: you have to train on how humans see color. (This has been a long-standing ambition of mine, but sadly there's not yet much work or infrastructure in the field of "graphics AI." There's barely one software rasterizer. https://github.com/vahidk/tf.rasterizer)

The key would be to spend an absurd amount of time carefully cataloguing good colors – by hand – and training it to extrapolate from that information. That's basically how the Musnell color system was created. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system It's the realization that color space isn't spherical, it's not a cube, it's not any shape at all except "how humans happened to evolve." Even the term "max chromaticity" is just a reflection of the weird way our brains happen to work, not an intrinsic property of color.

In that context, a universal curve fitting algorithm might be handy. Which of course is all that AI is.

deltron30308• 6 years ago

HSLuv is a sphere: https://www.hsluv.org/

They took the CIELUV/LCH/HCL solid and compressed it into a sphere, similar to HSL on top of RGB. The L* (perceptual luminance) value is consistent across hues, it can also replace the 100/200/300 scale for design systems.

But even the CIE model has flaws, chromacity is inherently linked with brightness/luminance, no color model can change that. A more saturated/chromatic color will always be perceived as more bright than a less chromatic one at the same luminance. And in order to create a palette you need normalization, which will always weed out individual color defining peaks.

mpetroff• 6 years ago

The key would be to spend an absurd amount of time carefully cataloguing good colors – by hand – and training it to extrapolate from that information.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Not only do you need to catalog good colors (and color combinations), you need to have it done by a large number of people, since different people perceive color differently and have different aesthetic preferences. This is something I've been working on in the limited context of color cycles for data visualization and plotting [1][2]. Based on my preliminary analysis, these data are quite noisy.

[1] https://colorcyclesurvey.mpetroff.net/ [2] https://mpetroff.net/2020/01/color-cycle-survey-update/

aurbano• 6 years ago

Fully agree with this, I think having color variables like blue-500, orange-100 is completely counter-productive.

What's the point of color variables, if they just describe the color they are... We already have color names for that.

trevyn6• 6 years ago

The intention is that colors of the same number have a similar luminance, so you can easily adjust contrast and hue independently while designing. These schemes also keep a relatively consistent saturation profile across the palette.

It's the kind of thing professional designers do intentionally, but set up in a system that makes it easier to get a "designed" look without much effort.

deltron30308• 6 years ago

The numbers describe the brightness, they can be useful if they're linked to UI usecases and if you're ok with limiting yourself to a prebuild color palette. It's just that functional names (btn-fg, btn-bg etc.) are better imo because they separate concerns. You could link them to a grayscale when prototyping and then later switch the colors in the stylesheet. It's also slower if you have to think about picking colors when coding.

dkersten• 6 years ago

I thought this immediately too but tailwind does allow you to use generic names too: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/customizing-colors#naming-your-...

swyx2• 6 years ago

i've added it to my list of color palette generation tools - sharing in case it helps someone else https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#col...

baxuz• 6 years ago

Thanks!

nateweiss• 6 years ago

Great resource, thank you for curating this list!

swyx2• 6 years ago

welcome! honestly been thinking about making it into a nicer site with previews and commentary and faving and stuff. just gotta find the time (heh, as with all side projects)

jack_riminton• 6 years ago

This works really well, I'll be using it on my upcoming projects :)

rutierut• 6 years ago

This is a lovely app but it really needs to generate grays as well. You just can't randomly drop in a color palette without changing the default TW grays. (they are pretty blue)

nickjj• 6 years ago

You just can't randomly drop in a color palette without changing the default TW grays. (they are pretty blue) reply

The Tailwind UI updated color palette at https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tailwindcss/ui has true greys with no color hue.

And you don't need Tailwind UI to use the updated colors (I asked Adam once). I think the plan is the updated color palette will eventually be rolled into a future Tailwind CSS update, if not already.

pottertheotter2• 6 years ago

All the colors were updated for Tailwind UI, and they are supposed to be incorporated into Tailwind CSS at some point:

"During early access, the components in Tailwind UI depend on some extensions we've added to the default Tailwind CSS config (like extra spacing values, updated, colors, additional shadows, etc.)

"These extensions will make their way into Tailwind itself in the future...."

The bottom of Tailwind UI documentation gives more info on the color palette changes, including the new grey:

https://tailwindui.com/documentation#how-tailwindcss-ui-exte...

manceraio5• 6 years ago

Yes, I also notice this. The model have some flaws. I could compensate adding some extra data points, but I wanted to train with the original palette. With the release of the new Tailwind palette I will have more data to train with and maybe it will get solved.

pspeter3• 6 years ago

You could also try training from other palettes but it does look really good! Adding a grays would be key.

RocketSyntax• 6 years ago

Why doesn't the generated palette include the original color? Makes me lose faith.

manceraio5• 6 years ago

Because the model doesn't overfit and that is good.

You don't want your model to mimic your trainning data. Otherwise, it would performe poorly with new data.

zxcvbn4038• 6 years ago

This does pick some pleasing palettes but I’m not clear how they are utilized in the page. A quick scan of Tailwindscss docs shows a bit of discussion about naming colors and picking a primary and secondary color but I don’t see much discussion about the other colors in their palettes. Anyone explain?

pottertheotter2• 6 years ago

Tailwind comes with a default color palette. Each color has a 9 shades (100, 200,... 900) and the colors can be used for various elements, such as background, border, font, etc. For example, you can set a border to the 500 shade indigo using the class "border-indigo-500".

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/customizing-colors#default-colo...

You can also create your own custom colors with whatever names you want, whether color names or something like "primary" as the primary color of your theme. For each you can set shades as well.

Show HN: AI color palette generator for Tailwindcss

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