Show HN: Colorvote.io – ranking all sRGB web colors by popularity

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.

The problem with anything crowd-sourced is always that without moderation the results are garbage, and moderation is generally expensive or at least requires passionate volunteers. Crowd-sourcing 16 million unique color names is bound to be problematic and very difficult to moderate.

I actually gave this a second thought as a technical problem. The CSS defines 140 color names. It would probably not be infeasible to crowd-source / invent 4,096 base color names spread out exactly evenly across the 3-dimensional RGB space (e.g. "maroon", "deep sky blue", "slate gray" and so on.) If we could then further name 64 "tints" (like "reddish", "dark bluish", "purple hazed"), one could express about 250,000 colors with base color + tint pairs (like "reddish deep sky blue" or "purple hazed maroon"). This should be already sufficient for expressing almost all colors normally needed for UI designs etc.

If even more fidelity was somehow desired, one could then add one more of the 64 tints from the same vocabulary with some qualifier, like 'slightly'. So e.g. "slighly purple hazed dark bluish slate gray". This system could express the full RGB space, and there would be always possibility to find a closeby very similar color with shorter name - e.g. "slight dark bluish reddish deep sky blue" => "reddish deep sky blue" => "deep sky blue".