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ColorBox by Lyft Design

colorbox.io

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Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#51

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.

20 years ago we were also much more limited in our options- 216-color web-safe palettes, minimal styling & layout, low-resolution displays, etc.

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#53
post #39
post #30

How do I use this thing?

I concur... I'm a developer not a designer, what am I looking at besides a nice gradient of colours... how do I use this tool?

Yeah I'm a dev with bad color taste (i.e. backend engineer...)

It would be nice if it said..use this color for acknowledge font, warning font, background, menu...etc...

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#54
post #49

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…

Thanks for such a terrific, well-informed and helpful comment!

It's a strong reminder how unbelievably complex "color" is.

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#55

This is a great tool! I have also recently started using a divergent color palette[1] when designing figures for publication, it's amazing how much nicer it looks than, for example, default color schemes in most graphing software... Definitely going to bookmark this for future use. [1] https://learnui.design/tools/data-color-picker.html#divergen...

I've used ColorBrewer[0] in the past for this purpose. It's got some great options for ensuring the colors are distinguishable by people with varying forms of colour blindness as well as in black and white. That last one is a big one because it's a pet peeve of mine when figures are unreadable in a printed paper. http://colorbrewer2.org/#type=sequential&scheme=BuGn&n=3

I've used the method described here [0] of simply incrementing hue by the golden ratio. You can generate dozens of colors that go well together yet are quite distinguishable.

[0] https://martin.ankerl.com/2009/12/09/how-to-create-random-co...

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#56
post #9

I could have used this about six months ago when I was starting a new web site for a company with only a main brand color and no notion of accent or complimentary colors. Definitely putting this in the resources folder for my next project.

There's been quite a few options around if you Google color palettes. Adobe's color and coolors are some popular ones: https://color.adobe.com https://coolors.co Or just use a good default like https://clrs.cc for base colors. Color palette are always one of the first things to set up with CSS variables when starting a new project so you don't have to think about specific colors (or use the color picker) when buildin…

I had a data visualization class as an "easy optional" in grad school. The professor told us "y'all are mathematicians and don't understand color. Pick some artwork you like and put it through Adobe Color instead of trying to make your own messes."

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#57
post #24

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.

Bulma is a gamechanger for me in this regard. I can get something professional looking up and running with literally no design experience. There are obviously limitations to it, but for my use cases it's great.

I'm an API guy who uses Python and Hy and I'm getting started with some front-end programming on my weekends to have some hobby projects with a public face. It annoys me that every website template now expects you to install via npm. Bulma is all-out with that.

If you dig down, it's apparently because the DSL Sass is used to generate CSS. But there are Sass compilers in C and Python and probably in Prolog at this juncture.

Re: ColorBox by Lyft Design

#60
post #9

I could have used this about six months ago when I was starting a new web site for a company with only a main brand color and no notion of accent or complimentary colors. Definitely putting this in the resources folder for my next project.

There's been quite a few options around if you Google color palettes. Adobe's color and coolors are some popular ones: https://color.adobe.com https://coolors.co Or just use a good default like https://clrs.cc for base colors. Color palette are always one of the first things to set up with CSS variables when starting a new project so you don't have to think about specific colors (or use the color picker) when buildin…

I've tried a bunch of online solutions, including Adobe's, but this one seems to work better with the way my brain works. I'm not sure if it's my workflow, or the way its presented visually, but it seems more useful for me.
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