Show HN: Explore color palettes inspired by 3000 master painter artworks

1. You have used the RGB hue wheel not the RYB hue wheel. The later defines the complementary pairs red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple which are more useful for an artist when evaluating hue. To those who would say that the difference between RTGB and RYB complementaries is subjective, I would point out that the red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple pairs have been known by artists since before Newton first expressed hue on a wheel.

2. I think it is fair to assume an artist has a consistent color pallet, but I'm not sure that a genre would.

3. User S0und has implied that paintings have changed too much from their point of creation for your work to be valid. For sure it is true that paintings have oxidized, accumulated multiple layers of dust-attracting varnish and been damaged by UV exposure. However, the relative difference between the colors they have used remains almost the same, and this is where the value of your work lays.

4. The key problem of visualizing the color of a painting is its dimensionality. A standard histogram does a super fine job at expressing the lightness value of an image. A radial hue histogram does the same for the hue/saturation. But there is no 2D graphical visualization that does both. Personally, I would go further and visualize separately the hue, saturation and lightness signatures of the artists. For most pre-modern painters, the lightness values closely mirrored their saturation values. Artists like Gericault and most of the Impressionists learned to separate them.

BTW... do you know this website?: https://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/history.html

I digress, back to HARSH criticism!!!

Playfair, Serif, in small sizes, I am not a fan. I can see why, and it works for H1 and H2, but, for those of us with elderly eyes, please can we have a sans-serif such as Inter, which does work on smaller sizes? Maybe A/B test that one, with the screen zoom level captured. My hunch is that I am not alone in having elderly eyesight and that people will be more engaged if they have an easier time of reading.

Next bit of harsh criticism - HTML standards. There does seem to be a use case for 'figure' and 'figcaption'. These work like the 2003 era 'div' and nobody cares about HTML, but why bother with HTML if everything is just divs nested in spans and divs?

In truth, 'div' is the element of last resort and not needed since we have joyful content sectioning elements such as 'section', 'article', 'aside' and much else. We also have a layout engine in CSS, as in CSS grid, and, in my experience, the 'div' is not helping. Code is just better when it is not a sea of divs, each with a gazillion class tags.

We have arrived at a situation where people just use 'div' because that was how grandpa wrote HTML when the iPhone came along and table layouts suddenly had to be 'responsive', as in bloated. We built whole departments around writing code badly with 'div' elements, with whole teams of micromanagers. On pet projects there is no need for any of this, plus you can do things like scoped CSS so there is no Firefox support, but also no need to torment oneself with CSS compiler things that create bloat and 'add to only' stylesheets.

But hey, none of this matters if everything works, which it does!

I also think you need some type of funnel to get people to the website in such a way that they come back. This might not matter to you, but, imagine you find this site, do you bookmark it, share a link with oneself, or what? There needs to be some type of hook, and bookmarks don't cut it these days. People want to Google Search for what they know.

One hook might be an upload feature, so you can upload many things. I like de Stihl artists from a century ago and some of them used paint that is still sold today. I also like old posters for British Raleigh bicycles and train posters from the period. The train posters were by commercial artists that made adverts, not art. Yet you still have some brilliant colours going on in their work.

Yes there are services for taking any image and making a palette from it, however, they haven't got the art. They can't do a 'goes with' feature, to show art that is in the user's colour scheme, from what they upload.

I am impressed by the colour naming, this is actually quite hard to write by oneself since you need to find something in a 3D search space. It seems to me that you have the hard stuff mostly solved but tinkering with the UI for stickiness is there to be done, ad nauseum.

Please don't take my HARSH criticisms unfairly, HN is the place for people to niggle, because some people like to cut the heads off others to feel taller, however, I am a genuine punter, and I have a bit more work to do before I get into the colour scheme, so I kind of need to be able to read things easily, remember where your website is and give it a proper go.

What might be useful is a palette export option in :root { CSS variables }, for example:

  :root {
    --color-a: #aabbcc;
    --color-b: #bbccdd;
    --color-c: #ccddee;
  }

  :root {
    --color-a: oklch(a, b, c);
    --color-b: oklch(b, c, d);
    --color-c: oklch(c, d, e);
  }

I still get the autoload of the next palette, mayb what you need instead is a good bit of doom scrolling, a.k.a. infinite scroll. That might be more engaging. I say this because my recipe app also needs infinite scroll for browsing purposes, so the user (my uncle) does not have to drill down to the recipes.