Intro
|
You need colors — to redesign your website, to repaint your living room, to plan your wedding, whatever. Not all colors look good together though, and nice color combos tend to lose their potency with overuse. That's where this site comes in. It helps you find the perfect color palette by exposing you to random, but theoretically balanced color combinations. You pick the combinations you like, some of which you've likely not considered before, and the computer "genetically" recombines them in various ways to give you other options that you're apt to like. |
|
Save the palettes that you really like and e-mail them to yourself along with all the numbers you need (RGB, HEX, HSV and CMYK), so you can to reproduce them elsewhere.
How Does It Work?
It's really very simple. The computer presents you with a set of randomly generated palettes. These are laid out in a similar fashion to a plate I once saw in the book Interaction of Color by Josef Albers, the painter and color theorist. His intention in laying out colors in the manner was to show how a color's proximity to another affects perception — colors appear to take on the hue of their neighbors.
The palettes themselves are randomly generating using a bit of classic color theory which says that people generally like schemes that are mostly formed from colors near each other of the color wheel, but that they also like a splash of color thrown in from the opposite side of the color wheel (the complementary color).
When you tell the program that you like certain palettes, it combines them with each other in various ways to give you more palettes that you're apt to like. Combinations include "mutations" of each parent (really just slight skews to the hue), "crossovers" (whose parents' base and complment colors are swapped), and "mixes" (whose colors occupy a middle range between those of each parent
New Features — You Can Tweak Now!
If you've been here before, note that I'm actively adding features to this site whenever I get the time. The volume of usage has been encouraging!
For now, I'll log them below.
| Date | Feature |
| October 7, 2008 | The Most Popular Colors page is now collecting and displaying data in real time! For now, it's just displaying the top ten most saved colors. Overtime though, as the database grows, I'll be adding more interesting displays to show how color tastes vary over place and time. |
| October 7, 2008 | I was seeing error reports related to Chroma-some relying on Google servers to keep too much in memory for too long. If you left the page open for a bit and then returned, you would likely get an error because key data had fallen out of memory. Now the entire session is backed by a database, so this should make for a much more stable ride. I also figure out how Python classes work (yeah!) and streamlined the code quite a bit. Pages now load faster, and the tweakers now tweak faster. |
| September 23, 2008 | You can now tweak hue, saturation and value of selected colors in your saved palettes. See Help. |
| September 21, 2008 | Chroma-some now assigns names to all generated palettes! I think it adds a lot to the experience (what's a can of paint without a name for the color inside?), though it does introduce a second or two of delay when you generate a new page of palettes. The names were user generated via this interesting online experiment by Nathan Moroney. John Foster culled 871 color terms from the experiment, and Chroma-some now pulls from them. The names are really, well, colorful, and when combined into the format "'complementary color' on 'base color'", sometimes the result reads a bit like found haiku ("dusk on avocado"). And sometimes the result is just plain silly ("slime on grandma"!). Most of the time though the description is startlingly accurate. Just watch out for some mismatches when you get into the dark colors due to the perceptual and technical reasons discussed here. Enjoy! |
Feedback
I'm interested to hear what you think of my first foray into programming. Please write me with bug reports and feature suggestions, or to just say hi.
How Much Does It Cost?
Nothing! Nada! Zilch!
