Makes me wonder which area of the Color space has the lowest resolution. As in “this name covers the most hex codes”.
Wonder no longer: https://codepen.io/meodai/full/zdgXJj/ Color distribution of Color-Names in various color models
Readit Newsmeodai commented on Show HN: A color name API that maps hex to the closest human-readable name meodai.github.io/color-na... · Posted by u/meodai
I fully approve of this app. My use case is CSS, more specifically SVG. I put SVG in custom properties for things like icons, then use them as pseudo elements, thereby keeping decoration out of the HTML and avoiding downloads for SVG specified in CSS. My SVG is always human readable and simple.
The slight problem with this is that I don't like having to escape the '#' character for colours. I prefer the nearest name, e.g. 'Chocolate' (which is orange).
Hence I have bookmarked this page.
One observation, I have now moved to oklch for everything else. I only do named colours and oklch, hex codes have gone the way of CMYK for me.
Are there any plans to make this tool oklch-friendly?
Thanks for the feedback. For now you would have to do the conversion yourself, but I plan to store the names in a more absolute format like xyz…
Is your name Mèo Dài - Longcat in Vietnamese? :)
Cool project! I wonder what commercial use cases come from it. On the My First Million podcast they talked a about a company selling color predictions to brands for multiple six figures. Maybe you can find correlations and predictions in the data one day.
nước đái I use it for all kinds of color generators.
I would also find such a tool useful, but names like “Watermelon Sugar”, “Tidal”, or “Singapore Orchid” don’t really help me at all. Just tell me something like “dark brown”, “pale green”, “hot pink”, “tan”, etc.
If you scroll down a bit, you will see that the api provides all kind of lists, there are plenty that are more descriptive or simpler depending on what you are going for.
> Having a tool to provide a name instead of an hex code is useful to discuss colors with other stakeholders (customers, colleagues, etc...)
But how useful are names that this website shows, e.g. the first few random names I got were "Singapore Orchid", "Scented Spring", "Lamiaceae", and "Lunatic Sky Dancer"?
I provide all kind of name lists. Depends a lot on what you are trying to accomplish. But there are plenty of lists providing more recognizable ones.
There's also https://colornames.org/ - crowdsourced attempt at naming all the colours. Currently at 25% (4215221).
Unfortunately most of the names are pretty bad.
Really nice idea. I've thought about building something similar but it's not a core feature of my product so I keep postponing it.
I do have to ask, though. Why would I ever want to resolve a color name as a network request instead of calling a function?
Because a) I keep adding names and b) the list weights over 1mb https://github.com/meodai/color-names
Curious if you could run it against the big old list of HN topcolors...
I just did, using `npx palette-aldente hn-colors.yml --formats name --namelist bestOf`: https://codepen.io/meodai/pen/ByNqbKE