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ColorBox by Lyft Design

colorbox.io

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Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#41

Post by jstummbillig »

hathawsh wrote: post #29
jstummbillig wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a non-designer, I am finding it easier and easier to get something professional looking up The reason you find it getting easier is not to be found in any of these tools, but in your repeated effort to "put something up" and getting better at it. You are learning how to design by doing design.

That's true, but guidance on how to get better at design is much more available than it used to be. I remember creating web sites 20 years ago and getting feedback that they looked dreadful. I had no idea why people didn't like them; I liked them! It turns out I like lots of things that most people don't and I needed guidance to find out what most people like.

> That's true, but guidance on how to get better at design is much more available than it used to be.

Absolutely. It's a wonderful time to learn.

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#46

Post by daxterspeed »

An interesting issue is that it's currently impossible to pick the direction of the hue rotation, so if your start and end colors are one opposite sides of the hue circle this tool will go "the long way around". Great for rainbows, not so great if you want to go from orange to purple over red.

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#47

Post by ceejayoz »

jstummbillig wrote: post #15
shanecoin wrote: post #4

As a non-designer, I am finding it easier and easier to get something professional looking up. Couple this with Material-UI and a solid looking template and you could have a beautiful, custom landing page up a day. There are obviously UX and other issues that I struggle to excel at, but from a simple, consumer-facing perspective, I see UI getting more and more manageable.

> As a non-designer, I am finding it easier and easier to get something professional looking up The reason you find it getting easier is not to be found in any of these tools, but in your repeated effort to "put something up" and getting better at it. You are learning how to design by doing design.

Maybe, maybe not.

My design sense remains abysmal. Being able to use something like Bootstrap to get a sensible look and feel is a big boon.

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#48

Post by matthewsmith_io »

spectramax wrote: post #31

Side topic: There is an abundance of Magenta/Purple colors in today's design from Stripe to GraphQL to Lyft... what gives? Why are designers obsessed with trends? I could give many many more examples if needed. Everywhere I see magenta/purple gradients.

At peak saturation, blue has the lowest luminosity, which gives it the greatest contrast against white. Purple, magenta, and red are next.

That's why we use blue and purple for links and not yellow.

It's really about achieving contrast and saturated/vibrant colors at the same time.

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#49

Post by tbabb »

daxterspeed wrote: post #46

An interesting issue is that it's currently impossible to pick the direction of the hue rotation, so if your start and end colors are one opposite sides of the hue circle this tool will go "the long way around". Great for rainbows, not so great if you want to go from orange to purple over red.

This is why I much prefer the Lab color space over HSV or HSL— it's much better suited to interpolation and mixing.

The critical properties are:

* It's a vector space, so mixing colors means mathematically mixing the components. There is no polar angle that can "go around the wrong way", or suddenly cause the interpolation to change when one color coordinate crosses zero degrees.

* It's perceptually uniform, so that taking mathematically even steps in color space means the result will be perceptually even as well (compare to color spaces which don't account for gamma, and small change on a dark color make a huge difference, but the same step in a light area is invisible).

* Because of the perceptual uniformity, there are no luminance dips or peaks in interpolated colors. In RGB, for example, interpolating two saturated colors which are far away from each other on the color wheel will result in dark grey or black in the middle of the gradient— not so with Lab. Also, consider an HSV rainbow: If you desaturate it, it isn't a uniform grey– some parts of the wheel are randomly brighter than others, because the human eye is more sensitive to yellow and green light, and very insensitive to blue. A rainbow with constant L coordinate in Lab space will have constant luminance.

* Because chromaticity is a 2D vector space in Lab color (rather than a single coordinate), interpolating between two distant hues won't put crazy unrelated hues in between them, but HSL and HSV will. Saturated, complementary colors will appropriately interpolate through a neutral grey in Lab, instead of through a "random" saturated hue.

Here's [1] an image of some constant-luminance (i.e., constant "L" coordinate) slices of Lab space, to give a sense of what it looks like.

Here's [2] a little color picker (found with a Google search) which shows you the results of interpolating in different spaces— you can see that RGB is pretty bad, but in HSV or HSL it's not hard to make something look extremely broken. Those two spaces are definitely the wrong choice for interpolation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space#/media/File... [2] http://davidjohnstone.net/pages/lch-lab-colour-gradient-pick...

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