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Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis

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Re: Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis

#11

Post by awongh »

epaladin wrote: post #7

Can this create a palette of an arbitrary number of colors, or is it limited to six? I've been looking for a good way to generate an arbitrary number of visually distinct colors for a while, to use in visualizing high dimensional datasets in bioinformatics. The closest I've come so far is http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/ (which is great but I need to port it to R one of these days)

wow, this is great! I've been trying to find this for a while.

Their theory page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_color_space) goes into how they do it, it's a pretty interesting approach of pre-calculating using CIE lab and then hcl for display/ui.

And the ui is well done, too.

Re: Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis

#12

Post by Sweyla »

Here is my immediate suggestion: Show only one palette at a time. By putting incompatible patterns so close, you get a matrix of colors that with high probability do not harmonize well.

I am assuming you have a slightly different algorithm for these three, since the middle one doesn't seem to match the root color's brightness, and they seem to match saturation differently too. Make a choice between these before you generate, and if you want to eliminate this choice, I would go with the one that tries to match brightness/saturation as much as possible.

This caught my eye because I developed my own algorithm for this a few years ago and applied it to syntax highlighting[1].

[1] http://sweyla.com/themes/

Re: Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis

#13

Post by lubujackson »

Maybe this is useful, but I'd like to see a little bit of info on each palette as to WHY it was generated the way it was generated. The palette you need for a pie chart is much different than one you need for a website.

For web site palettes, I like to poke around on http://www.colourlovers.com for inspiration. http://colorschemedesigner.com helps with finding appropriately distanced colors that work nicely together (set colorspace to Opaltone colors to find a nice palette) and there is always http://www.colorhexa.com when I just want to quickly darken or lighten a color.

Re: Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis

#15

Post by nanidin »

psuter wrote: post #4

Picking colors is an interesting problem at the boundary of what can be done algorithmically with satisfactory results. For my latest side project, I needed sets of up to 5 colors that go well together but are sufficiently distant not too be confused. Since this is the task that palette generators typically set out to achieve, I tried a couple of them [1,2], as well as some "hand crafted" palettes found on design blo…

Take a look at Munsell for Designers[0] - it purports to solve the UI palette problem.

[0]http://projects.kumpf.cc/projects/MunsellForDesigners/index....

Re: Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis

#16

Post by microtonal »

epaladin wrote: post #7

Can this create a palette of an arbitrary number of colors, or is it limited to six? I've been looking for a good way to generate an arbitrary number of visually distinct colors for a while, to use in visualizing high dimensional datasets in bioinformatics. The closest I've come so far is http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/ (which is great but I need to port it to R one of these days)

I have recently written a library that picks N as distinct possible from the RGB color space. Since RGB is not a perceptual color space, it measures distances between RGB colors in CIE Lab. Since the optimization of the most distinct color set can get stuck in local maxima, it uses simulated annealing for optimization.

One nice touch is that you can plug your own random RGB color generators that feed the optimizer, to find N distinct colors in a subspace of RGB. E.g., I use it to generate distinct pastel colors in visualization of linguistic data.

https://github.com/danieldk/quzah

(I am not an expert in this topic, but I couldn't find a good Java library with solid theoretical underpinnings.)

Re: Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis

#17

Post by eam »

lubujackson wrote: post #13

Maybe this is useful, but I'd like to see a little bit of info on each palette as to WHY it was generated the way it was generated. The palette you need for a pie chart is much different than one you need for a website. For web site palettes, I like to poke around on http://www.colourlovers.com for inspiration. http://colorschemedesigner.com helps with finding appropriately distanced colors that work nicely together…

Sometimes I'll browse through designs on http://dribbble.com/, when I see a design where I like the colors I'll click on it and it'll actually show me a nice palette of all colors in the design. What's nice about it is since these designs were done by great designers the palette almost always works as-is which is quite nice. :)

Re: Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis

#18

Post by pyrocat »

Sweyla wrote: post #12

Here is my immediate suggestion: Show only one palette at a time. By putting incompatible patterns so close, you get a matrix of colors that with high probability do not harmonize well. I am assuming you have a slightly different algorithm for these three, since the middle one doesn't seem to match the root color's brightness, and they seem to match saturation differently too. Make a choice between these before you g…

That's pretty rad. Is the source available anywhere? I'd like to see something like this for Sublime.

Re: Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis

#19

Post by jessaustin »

epaladin wrote: post #7

Can this create a palette of an arbitrary number of colors, or is it limited to six? I've been looking for a good way to generate an arbitrary number of visually distinct colors for a while, to use in visualizing high dimensional datasets in bioinformatics. The closest I've come so far is http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/ (which is great but I need to port it to R one of these days)

For arbitrarily many colors, use the golden ratio:

http://martin.ankerl.com/2009/12/09/how-to-create-random-col...

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