studies in color

October 30, 2003

This wonderful color scheme selector (and more reading on color
via Usable Design Media) got me thinking more about color. This neat app also has options to see the color scheme with variations of color blindness. You can preview your own website using this colorblind filter (via the other blog).

There must be hundreds of color pickers on the web, Nathan Steiner reviews 36 of them. Bob Stein who created VisiBone ColorLab and other nitfy tools says “I believe complexity is best mastered by seeing the whole picture in rich detail; that expertise consists mainly of vivid mental pictures.”

It certainly helps me to have brilliant living images in my minds eye, which I aspire to make real in software or other designs. When I was writing 3D computer software in college and designing complex scenes and animation in pure text, I acquired the peculiar skill of visualizing light, saturation and hue from seemingly random alphanumeric series. This ability has been continuously useful as I drifted through user interface design, video compositing and special effects, alpha channel rendering, multimedia and web applications. If someone had asked me, I might have said that by the time the new millennium rolled around I wouldn’t be needing to remember this odd mapping from what I expect to see to RGB. I’m particularly fond of ddddff.

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