I think that if there is voting, one should sort of do some type of spreading algorithm where the color you vote on, is sort of a much weaker vote for the surrounding colors.
There is just too many colours, especially in this color space, and it is sort of hard for humans to really differentiate them. Thus spread out the vote based on average human visual perception differentiability capabilities.
Also this color space (R x B x G box color space) spends too many bits on low intensity and high intensity colors. When a color is near white or black, we can not easily tell the hues apart.
A much better color space to vote on would be something akin to the Pantone color list or paint swatches. Way less colors but still roughly covering the whole color space.
Picking a color from a pallet of similar colors is explicitly rejecting the nearby colors on the swatch.
It is exactly the opposite of a weak vote for nearby colors.
Of course, "nearby colors" depends on which axis (or axes) of the color space is/are changing, the rates of change, and what is the criterion for ordering the aspects of color.
Historically, voting on colors is a strong tradition in color science.
Because color is a property of human perception not a property of the external world...turn out the lights and the apple isn't red any more.
Ultimately, wouldn't that just see which is the most popular background color? Pixel-for-pixel the background takes up the largest percentage of screen space on most websites.
Though I would also be interested to see what the most popular background colors are. My money's on white and off-white.
People would probably vote more if they had to vote at least 5 times to see the ranks, i.e. say "3 more votes to see ranks" in top center, and then pop up the ranks automatically.
Here I am clicking color after color like a dunce, wondering when I get to see the ranking. After 20-30 or so clicks I finally notice the ultra-tiny-low-contrast "Ranks" text.
The observations of the other comments would be strange indeed, if it were. Looking back through old discussions, it turns out I'd misremembered a mix of speculating comments as fact. Most conclusively, the order is now completely different to when the page was discussed last month:
This is a perfect example of why we need ranked choice voting. I think #BD60E2 is best, but due to its unpopularity I'm forced to vote #BD60E1 if I want my vote to matter.
Idk if you're serious or not, but this site actually does ranked voting: you don't get to choose your favorite color out of 17M, but you rank pairs. The problem here is that you can vote a variable number of times. I guess it's possible to come up with different algorithms to determine the winner.
Just a heads up, if you're using any dark mode extension you'll want to disable it for this site. (op, probably worth getting your site added to the global dark mode list)
Presumably the text color will distort the preferences? You're not deciding you prefer a color, you're deciding you prefer a background color for a white font.
At the moment it seems to be always white, maybe if it's always the opposite color on the color wheel that might offset it? Or maybe just have the text on a white card on the edge of the screen so you can focus on the color itself?
I suspect people are choosing more because of hue and undertones than strictly on RGB colors. It would be more interesting to aggregate the results up into more general conclusions - do people like pastels or earth tones better? How bright of a color is too bright before people stop voting for it? How dark?
I've been into 70's colorscapes recently, so when given the chance I vote for earthy tones, then beyond that I may pick colors I know i like, or based on emotional gut reaction, it depends how hard the gut reaction hits me. I'd be curious to have these stats as well. I'd also be curious to know, how often do I pick the colors I think are my favorite. Purple is my favorite color, but it doesn't appear often in earthy tones and I think I would prefer an earthy or washed out orange or green to a washed out purple.
Voting on all 16 million is a cool concept, but given that this is probably going to be popular for only a day or so, probably not achievable. From your own ranks, only 0.27% of colours have been voted on at all, and most likely the majority of those voted on have a single vote.
Personally I think that's okay. I also think it might make sense for any summary to lump colors together using clustering and averaging the group using a colorspace like Oklab.
There's lots of room for different types of analyses here!
That won't give you a ranking in practice - you'd get 90% of colours receiving 0 votes so there's no way to distinguish them. I think the output of this game would be more interesting to analyse.
I felt my vote was very influenced by how many times I had already seen that hue. I probably would have voted more often for certain shades of green if I hadn't seen a slight variation of them three times already, for instance.
This was oddly satisfying and I voted on a bunch of colors. Definitely a bias towards my personal preferences and also what I think would be useable for websites but fun idea! Will be great to see the resulting data.
Huh, stumbled upon a strange visual effect. I got #0cc3bf (sorta cyan) above #acc2e0. When looking at the cyan, the other colour appeared lighter shade of blue/cyan in my peripheral vision. When I then looked straight at the lower colour it turned lilac. Almost pink to begin with. The effect was quite striking initially, to the extent that I suspected the page was varying the colour.
I'm on mobile. The phone was perhaps a little over a foot from my face. It's a sunny day in a room with a South facing window. I have a warmish LED light on (3000K).
Do they strictly increase vote on only the hues shown? Having a weighted multiplier of the vote on nearby hues that decreases the further away you go would reach a conclusion quicker.
I'm more interested in the algorithm behind the pairing. I wonder if it's randomly pairing colours or using something similar to adaptive comparative judgement.
- I don’t think the ordering relation is acyclical if no specific usage scenario is given for the color.
- After grading a dozen of color pairs or so and then looking at the rankings, I noticed that I had Smart Invert Colors turned on and had thus voted on the inverted colors. (I noticed because it seemed unlikely to me that most of the highest-ranking colors would be shades of brown. ;))
The hex codes cannot be selected/copied out which was disappointing, but perhaps worse is that the hex codes slowly fade away completely!
I only noticed the first time because there was a gorgeous gold/purple combination that I wanted to save, which makes me think there might be another layer of combination that can be saved which is worst/best combinations of colour.
I was going to comment that it's a joke project, so there is no need for usefulness, but then I realized your comment might be a joke comment and I'm lost in confusion now
2 colors appear on both best and worst. Each lists a maximum of 5 colors. That should be enough to stop the experiment right there, unless your goal is to find the most controversial colors.
The takeaway seems to be that color preferences are highly subjective to the point that you might just be getting noise.
Also how is it that people are even seeing the same colors for this to have happened? Even with birthday problem seems unlikely that two of the exact same hex colors would end up on the two very short lists. Are you sure you're shuffling these?
Currently #d8e3a8 is the 4th best but also the second worst. Likewise #cce0c9 is the 5th best and 3rd worst. Has there been fewer than 10 colors voted on or what gives?
Might work as a joke but several of those colors will be indistinguishable to human eye, yet have completely different crowd-sourced names.
Or - could you ever tell the difference between "Amateur Rockstar Bright Pink" (#ff1aab) and "Pink Soul Of Heart" (#ff1bab) even if your life depended on it?
The fact that 24-bit RGB can represent 16 million colors does not mean our vision is capable of telling such number of colors apart from each other. Creating a coherent and concise naming system for all them could be an interesting (and perhaps quite challenging) technical task, but I don't believe crowd-sourcing those will yield any usable results. Or - how many colors with "poop" in their name do you think is acceptable? https://colornames.org/search/results/?type=partial&query=po...
I wrote this blog post many many moons ago, but it'll give you the optimal color (black or white) for any given color/background. Should be quick and easy conversion from c# to javascript.
I wonder how context sensitive these are. Will votes be different depending on pairings?
Now I'm imagining a site where you have a standard format(Like a page with body, borders, headers, links, banners, etc, or just an abstract arrangement of 2-5 colors), and people make pallets and vote on them.
Every one was easy to pick my preferred color until I got to 824268 and 199989. I honestly couldn’t choose which I preferred. I sat there for awhile trying to decide when the colors changed. Is it on a timer or did I accidentally choose one of the colors, even though I don’t think I did?
It's a nice toy, but I doubt its practical value as in design you deal with color palettes, not standalone colors. I might be wrong, but my gut feeling is that "the most popular" color wouldn't necessarily end up as a part of the most popular palette, or even in top 5.
> But which one of these motherfuckers is the best color?
> Together, we've voted on 0.27834177017211914% of all colors.
> (Don't worry, we'll get there.)
Good news is, you are completely right and the author agrees. It is a joke. Which brings us to the bad news — but it's a monday which is hard enough so I'll let it slide.
The contrast with the text that shows the hex code seems to interfere with my judgement. Perhaps leaving out the text, or showing it in smaller text on the bottom could help a tiny bit. But I suspect monitor quality/calibration has a larger effect.
Excited to see some results from this. I was disappointed that there was no real payoff as an end user who voted. Any way to see the current overall status of like the top 100?
I'm voting nearly the exact opposite. Hadn't thought of it this "burning" way (on mobile it's smaller, maybe that's why?) but bright colors are fun colors for me.
Mobile vs desktop, OLED votes vs. LCD votes, indoors vs sunlight etc. would also be interesting to compare.
bhouston|3 years ago
There is just too many colours, especially in this color space, and it is sort of hard for humans to really differentiate them. Thus spread out the vote based on average human visual perception differentiability capabilities.
Also this color space (R x B x G box color space) spends too many bits on low intensity and high intensity colors. When a color is near white or black, we can not easily tell the hues apart.
A much better color space to vote on would be something akin to the Pantone color list or paint swatches. Way less colors but still roughly covering the whole color space.
bestouff|3 years ago
brudgers|3 years ago
It is exactly the opposite of a weak vote for nearby colors.
Of course, "nearby colors" depends on which axis (or axes) of the color space is/are changing, the rates of change, and what is the criterion for ordering the aspects of color.
Historically, voting on colors is a strong tradition in color science.
Because color is a property of human perception not a property of the external world...turn out the lights and the apple isn't red any more.
spookthesunset|3 years ago
Isn’t that what the gamma is for?
elil17|3 years ago
mcv|3 years ago
GekkePrutser|3 years ago
That would have made a lot more sense than what they're doing. I'd really like to see the outcome of that. Not this random comparison.
drewzero1|3 years ago
Though I would also be interested to see what the most popular background colors are. My money's on white and off-white.
permo-w|3 years ago
it would be fairly easily to implement, although probably quite expensive in either cost or time
irrational|3 years ago
aetherspawn|3 years ago
I don't think anyone would be mad.
kortex|3 years ago
In my defense I'm outside with a ton of glare...
iso1631|3 years ago
mgdlbp|3 years ago
mgdlbp|3 years ago
The observations of the other comments would be strange indeed, if it were. Looking back through old discussions, it turns out I'd misremembered a mix of speculating comments as fact. Most conclusively, the order is now completely different to when the page was discussed last month:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220615213203/https://news.ycom...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31759722)
cozzyd|3 years ago
sph|3 years ago
Would be nice to see percentages/total users. It might be only used by 5 accounts of the same person.
themikesanto|3 years ago
WrtCdEvrydy|3 years ago
gauddasa|3 years ago
game-of-throws|3 years ago
tgv|3 years ago
LeonB|3 years ago
spiderfarmer|3 years ago
zachrip|3 years ago
867-5309|3 years ago
JansjoFromIkea|3 years ago
At the moment it seems to be always white, maybe if it's always the opposite color on the color wheel that might offset it? Or maybe just have the text on a white card on the edge of the screen so you can focus on the color itself?
kryptn|3 years ago
eganist|3 years ago
Kiro|3 years ago
codingdave|3 years ago
mikkergp|3 years ago
yreg|3 years ago
Obviously, the best color is #BADA55
[0] - https://www.colourlovers.com/colors/most-loved/all-time/meta
ryanbrunner|3 years ago
runnerup|3 years ago
There's lots of room for different types of analyses here!
google234123|3 years ago
akerr|3 years ago
2. Black
3. Colours (mostly blue)
Still disappointed?
867-5309|3 years ago
gitgud|3 years ago
akerr|3 years ago
sweezyjeezy|3 years ago
forgetfulness|3 years ago
enahs-sf|3 years ago
anonymous_sorry|3 years ago
I'm on mobile. The phone was perhaps a little over a foot from my face. It's a sunny day in a room with a South facing window. I have a warmish LED light on (3000K).
mysterydip|3 years ago
qurashee|3 years ago
layer8|3 years ago
- I don’t think the ordering relation is acyclical if no specific usage scenario is given for the color.
- After grading a dozen of color pairs or so and then looking at the rankings, I noticed that I had Smart Invert Colors turned on and had thus voted on the inverted colors. (I noticed because it seemed unlikely to me that most of the highest-ranking colors would be shades of brown. ;))
overlordalex|3 years ago
I only noticed the first time because there was a gorgeous gold/purple combination that I wanted to save, which makes me think there might be another layer of combination that can be saved which is worst/best combinations of colour.
miqueturner|3 years ago
jbmny|3 years ago
Majestic121|3 years ago
bil7|3 years ago
xiconfjs|3 years ago
andy_ppp|3 years ago
The “best” colours also seem really bad, I wonder if what they appear next to gives false results. Still, interesting idea!
ralusek|3 years ago
The takeaway seems to be that color preferences are highly subjective to the point that you might just be getting noise.
Also how is it that people are even seeing the same colors for this to have happened? Even with birthday problem seems unlikely that two of the exact same hex colors would end up on the two very short lists. Are you sure you're shuffling these?
TrickyRick|3 years ago
manquer|3 years ago
ollifi|3 years ago
vesinisa|3 years ago
Or - could you ever tell the difference between "Amateur Rockstar Bright Pink" (#ff1aab) and "Pink Soul Of Heart" (#ff1bab) even if your life depended on it?
The fact that 24-bit RGB can represent 16 million colors does not mean our vision is capable of telling such number of colors apart from each other. Creating a coherent and concise naming system for all them could be an interesting (and perhaps quite challenging) technical task, but I don't believe crowd-sourcing those will yield any usable results. Or - how many colors with "poop" in their name do you think is acceptable? https://colornames.org/search/results/?type=partial&query=po...
And how about "asdf" (the first four letters on the home row of a QWERTY keyboard - an age-old internet troll version of "foobar")? https://colornames.org/search/results/?type=partial&query=as...
viggity|3 years ago
http://blog.nitriq.com/BlackvsWhiteText.aspx
eternityforest|3 years ago
Now I'm imagining a site where you have a standard format(Like a page with body, borders, headers, links, banners, etc, or just an abstract arrangement of 2-5 colors), and people make pallets and vote on them.
irrational|3 years ago
ivanhoe|3 years ago
jstummbillig|3 years ago
> But which one of these motherfuckers is the best color?
> Together, we've voted on 0.27834177017211914% of all colors.
> (Don't worry, we'll get there.)
Good news is, you are completely right and the author agrees. It is a joke. Which brings us to the bad news — but it's a monday which is hard enough so I'll let it slide.
throwingrocks|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
brian_herman|3 years ago
tgv|3 years ago
bulbosaur123|3 years ago
That would at least make it interesting to keep voting and seeing the map fill out.
beeskneecaps|3 years ago
Philip-J-Fry|3 years ago
Aachen|3 years ago
Mobile vs desktop, OLED votes vs. LCD votes, indoors vs sunlight etc. would also be interesting to compare.
heliophobicdude|3 years ago
https://imgur.com/a/jZRQyt3
throwaway290|3 years ago
simplify|3 years ago
sangupta|3 years ago
nixpulvis|3 years ago
NazakiAid|3 years ago
excitom|3 years ago
mensetmanusman|3 years ago
lukaszkups|3 years ago
qainsights|3 years ago
whoomp12342|3 years ago
andsoitis|3 years ago