Storied Colors – A catalogue of named colors

by susiecambria • 1 month ago

228 55 1 month ago

mmooss• 1 month ago

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.

lekevicius• 1 month ago

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.

zetalyrae2• 1 month ago

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 :(

1f60c• 1 month ago

"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

egeozcan• 1 month ago

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.

hiccuphippo2• 1 month ago

Do AI crawlers actually follow robots.txt rules? They didn't care about rules when they trained them on copyrighted works so why would they follow the rules here?

hiccuphippo2• 1 month ago

There's no rebeccapurple.

bombcar• 1 month ago

We'll get it by Friday.

saltyoutburst• 1 month ago

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

susiecambria2• 1 month ago

Ooh, cool. Will check it out :-)

jmatan• 1 month ago

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

esikich2• 1 month ago

Who cares. As if every website needs to be meticulously hand crafted. You mad at people that use css templates too?

encrypted_bird2• 1 month ago

Who cares?

I care. So do they.

nonethewiser2• 1 month ago

Agree except I think it actually fits the content of the page. Seems like a natural fit.

gchamonlive• 1 month ago

Does the background colour have a history too?

mm263• 1 month ago

Terrible AI prose

jgord• 1 month ago

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.

purifyingFlame2• 1 month ago

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.

jabl2• 1 month ago

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.

nonethewiser2• 1 month ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GtF_zpJc_w

danielvaughn• 1 month ago

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...

NetOpWibby• 1 month ago

When I learned of this it hit me at the time that the web is made of real people, built by real people.

moralestapia• 1 month ago

And, as usual, some of those people are more equal that others.

DicIfTEx• 1 month ago

Meyer has continued to mark anniversaries in the life Rebecca would have led, most recently a week ago on what would have been her eighteen birthday: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2026/06/07/eighteen/

patates• 1 month ago

Life is colorful, life is cruel. Do not just hug your loved ones, hug the people who cannot hug their loved ones. A bit of kindness and a bit of sympathy go a long way.

Rest in peace Rebecca.

https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2018/06/07/decimated/

iberator• 1 month ago

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.

lutusp• 1 month ago

Why isn't my favorite color on the list: Unforeseeable Fuchsia?

S3verin• 1 month ago

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.

jcattle2• 1 month ago

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...

rendx• 1 month ago

Landshade: Nice work. Would be cool to be able to find similar ones across the globe, compare selected country color profiles, etc.

jcattle2• 1 month ago

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

plastic0412• 1 month ago

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.

[0] https://chinesecoloratlas.com/

johanyc• 1 month ago

I don't think it is a case that llm happens to create similar stuff. Either both are made by the same person or one is a copycat of the other.

What are the odds of both websites showing the same color today (Cochineal and 胭脂)?

And both use Roman numerals MMXXVI ? It makes no sense to use that in a "Chinese" color website.

plastic0412• 1 month ago

I think they are made by different people/organizations. Chinese colors is by TOTM Tech, which sells various (pretty obviously vibe coded) design tools and assets. OP doesn't sell anything so I don't think they are related.

MMXXVI

That too. LLMs love to writing year in roman numeral. https://github.com/search?q=%22%C2%B7+MMXXVI%22&type=code There are 2.8k of these in github.

the same color today

Looks liks Chinese colors always show that color in Hero section? It's coincidence I think.

ur-whale• 1 month ago

Searched for teal, couldn't find it ... mmmh.

emil-lp• 1 month ago

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/

and the survey

https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317227

Theodores• 1 month ago

My home town was famous for the red cloth that the British Army used to wear. This same red cloth was the main 'trade cloth' for the East India company and native peoples, the world over, just wanted it. The East India company wasn't paying for stuff in silver, the red cloth was worth more than that.

As for why my home town dominated the red cloth trade, well, there are reasons. The 14th century plague is part of the story as that is when sheep took over the land. Thanks to the British weather, the sheep developed a hard wearing wool which was perfect for the armies of the world and for clothing the slaves of the world.

Then geology came into play, with an abundance of Fuller's Earth, important for getting the wool clean. Coupled with that were teasels, necessary for processing the wool. Even the water comes into it, since the Industrial Revolution started with water wheel power.

Eventually competition came from Yorkshire for this particular broadcloth. Many aeons later, WW1 came along and charging into battle with red tunics became somewhat fatal. That was it for the product.

Sure, this particular red is one of the billions of colours out there, so it is of no surprise that it is omitted, however, the history is awesome, but you need someone that knows their history to tell the story.

LLMs lack passion and the ability to interpret varying sources in the way that a historian can. Notionally there is depth of knowledge with LLMs, since everything ever written is known, but then there is no depth of knowledge. You read, and read and read, to learn very little.

We have an interesting 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should' aspect of LLMs. I appreciate that, superficially, this website looks awesome, but who is it for?

As a HN person, I need P3 OKLCH colours and I have an expectation that the colour in question will stay on the page, at least as a sticky header. I would also expect a 3D-modelling style 'sphere', showing the specular highlight, diffuse and ambient lighting to be showing how the colour works. I appreciate that my art friends have no idea what I am on about here, so what do they get?

Here is an example from the pre-LLM days:

https://uk.winsornewton.com/blogs/articles/winsor-blue

Anyone British that has an artist's studio and a brush will have many, many Winsor and Newton colours, they are a major brand and truly storied, at least in the UK. Clearly they put some effort into 'evergreen content' by writing up their various colours.

As for whom they are writing for, they have customers! They didn't pay people to write blog articles just because they could, they did it because they should. They have product to shift.

I am sure they did a little bit of keyword stuffing with their blog articles, as was the fashion, and all of it is 'marketing', but still, it is much better writing than anything LLM.

Getting back to 'should' and 'could', the crux of the matter is if you have something of value. True value, according to some economics people, is a product of human labour, with machines not really cutting it, unless you count the human effort needed to design, make, maintain and calibrate the machine.

It is a bit of a controversial opinion, however, I think the only value of doing things the LLM way is just that, you can prove that you can do things the LLM way. This is legitimate in a job marketplace that demands AI with everything. But, once that novelty has worn off?

We will see what survives the test of time. Maybe Winsor and Newton will sack their content creators and just get an LLM to churn out blog articles. But, would any of that have any value?

Nope.

Would any of it survive the test of time?

Nope.

An added aspect to LLM use is criticism. Humans deserve respect and you can't just go around dissing the hard work of others because that just is not nice. But, use an LLM and you can basically say 'that is a load of rubbish because you cheated'. Painful.

That aside, you do have something that could be really good. But you can't leave the reader underwhelmed or else they won't be back or signing up for more. Writing original content is hard. If I had to write an essay for school homework on my hometown's special red colour, it would take me all week to do research. Even then I would have barely scraped the surface. Writing a compelling essay would also require skill at writing, plus I would need someone else to proof-read, edit and fact check for me.

For the next colour I would be back to square one, and if this colour took me far from the history and culture of my home town, I might be way off the mark with assumptions made. Note that Winsor and Newton would not hire me, if writing that slow, unless I was a 'distinguished fellow' at some art place of note.

TonyStr2• 1 month ago

Cool idea, but unfortunately low-effort AI slop. The colors are covered in vibe-coded patterns that obscure the actual color, much of the writing is wrong and soulless. The prompter writes on the site that he uses AI to support in writing, because as a man with a day job it would be "impossible" to write all this himself. I'd urge him to write in his own words, starting with a minimal subset of colors and slowly building up a library. It could be a "one entry per day" challenge, or even just "one entry per week". Why is everyone in such a rush?

Infiniti20• 1 month ago

What vibe coded patterns?

TonyStr2• 1 month ago

on `.home-hero__grain` there is a repeating dot-pattern that obscures the underlying color:

``` background-image: radial-gradient(circle at 23% 12%,rgba(255,255,255,.6) 0 1px,transparent 1.5px),radial-gradient(circle at 78% 41%,rgba(255,255,255,.5) 0 1px,transparent 1.5px),radial-gradient(circle at 12% 73%,rgba(0,0,0,.5) 0 1px,transparent 1.5px),radial-gradient(circle at 55% 88%,rgba(255,255,255,.5) 0 1px,transparent 1.5px),radial-gradient(circle at 88% 18%,rgba(0,0,0,.4) 0 1px,transparent 1.5px); background-size: 7px 7px,11px 11px,9px 9px,13px 13px,8px 8px; ```

vortegne• 1 month ago

I was excited about the website up until I clicked into my first color and read the page. Terrible slop writing. Makes me question the author's judgement in general.

momoraul• 1 month ago

Lost a solid 20 minutes to this. Something about a weird, evocative color name makes you picture the shade before the swatch even loads.

pbmango• 1 month ago

This is fascinating as a lover of both oil painting and history.

pbhjpbhj• 1 month ago

I have an acquaintance who is a professional artist[1]. He has some great stories about colours/paints/pigments. I suppose it's akin to tales of who created a particular programming tool/compiler, or when a language weirdly added gotos (PHP!). It's great to hear experts opine on their craft. Not sure we have that here, but still.

https://www.alastairjohngordon.com

Storied Colors – A catalogue of named colors

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