▲Storied Colors – a catalogue of named colors(storiedcolors.com)
141 points by susiecambria 9 hours ago | 13 comments
▲S3verin 2 minutes ago
The color display has some texture to it with slightly warying shades. Which one is now the bespoke color? And the AI slop is really offputting.
▲danielvaughn 4 hours ago
The web has its own storied color, albeit a tragic one. Rebecca Purple is a named CSS color, which was added in tribute to Eric Meyer's daughter, who very sadly passed away at a young age. That shade was her favorite color.

https://medium.com/@valgaze/the-hidden-purple-memorial-in-yo...

▲NetOpWibby 3 hours ago
When I learned of this it hit me at the time that the web is made of real people, built by real people.
▲moralestapia 2 hours ago
And, as usual, some of those people are more equal that others.
▲jgord 4 hours ago
Their VanDyke Brown looks more like a Burnt Sienna to my eyes, but that might just be my screen.

You may also enjoy the Chromatopia book : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40554590-chromatopia

The author produces a very nice range of oil colors under the Langridge brand in Melbourne, downunder... its nice to keep these artisanal practices alive.

Would be handy to have the standard pigment codes. Ive been gradually moving away from using heavy metals such as Cadmiums. Haven't found the perfect red, although Napthol Red PR170 and Pyrrole "Ferrari" Red PR254 are pretty close to primary for mixing from a limited palette.

Its really surprising how you can get gorgeous brick-red browns and deep purplish blacks from mixing a near primary red and primary blue.

▲purifyingFlame 8 minutes ago
This is the kind of note I was hoping for. Standard pigment codes (PR170, PR254 etc) are a good call and I wanted a proper Color Index field and this pushes it up the list. I will also take another look at the Van Dyke Brown swatch. You may be right that it reads too close to burnt sienna. Chromatopia looks like a lovely book and thanks for the Langridge pointer, glad those artisanal makers are still going.
▲saltyoutburst 7 hours ago
For a word nerd exploration of how colours are defined in dictionaries, check out 'True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color' by Kory Stamper. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237693038-true-color
▲susiecambria 7 hours ago
Ooh, cool. Will check it out :-)
▲nonethewiser 4 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GtF_zpJc_w
▲lutusp 3 hours ago
Why isn't my favorite color on the list: Unforeseeable Fuchsia?
▲mmooss 8 hours ago
> Most of what you can read about historical color on the web has been rewritten three or four times from the same Wikipedia paragraph, with the citations dropped along the way. What you are reading here is an attempt to put the citations back.

That implies the entries also are based on the Wikipedia paragraph, though I think the author means they do their own research. The entries I looked at list several high-quality entries in a bibliography at the bottom but don't cite any of the text. Also, I don't know who wrote these - do they have any idea what they are talking about? Is this LLM output?

If anonymity ever worked (almost never in scholarship), it may not work anymore due to LLMs.

▲lekevicius 7 hours ago
> Known generative-AI crawlers are disallowed in robots.txt. This is a research catalogue assembled from primary sources; it is not training data, and a model fine-tuned on these paragraphs would launder out exactly the part — the citations — that gives the prose its value.

This reads like distaste for LLMs - but generally website reads (and is designed as!) very LLMy.

▲zetalyrae 7 hours ago
If the About page said who made it, i.e. if someone was putting their reputation on the line, I might be more receptive. But the website has enough LLM design tics to make me suspicious.

It's sad. I come to Hacker News to see cool stuff and when I click on a link and see something obviously put together by an LLM I feel like I've been tricked :(

▲purifyingFlame 13 minutes ago
Fair hit and I should have done that from the start. There is a person behind this and the About page is now updated (https://storiedcolors.com/about). Short version: I'm a technical architect who painted as a kid, stopped for years, and started this to get back into it. I do use AI to draft the entries and I'm not going to pretend otherwise but I check every one against named, non-Wikipedia sources and cut what I cant source. You shouldn't take that on faith so the methodology and the citations are there to check and there's a corrections address when I get something wrong. I totally get the "put together by an LLM" reaction on how it felt. I'd rather try and earn the trust back than argue about it.
▲mkprc 7 hours ago
Right?! It's a bummer when a nice-looking website is now a red flag. It's become part of my workflow now browsing the web to check the About/Contact page on a website immediately; if there's no real person behind the site, how can it be trusted?
▲susiecambria 7 hours ago
Apologies. Was taken with the names and stories. . . didn't read the about page. Guess my critical thinking was on the fritz. Seriously, learn a lot here and will try to do better.
▲thorum 4 hours ago
I actually think “explore Claude’s understanding of colors” is an interesting concept. A lot of fascinating cultural information gets compressed into LLMs.
▲zetalyrae 2 hours ago
I think so too. But if that's what it is, that's how it should be presented.
▲1f60c 6 hours ago
"One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison." is so Claude it hurts. :'D
▲egeozcan 6 hours ago
They may have used LLMs to design the site but IMHO the content is fine and well-sourced. Example: https://storiedcolors.com/color/blaze-orange/

Even if LLMs were used to help, someone must have spent a lot of time on making it read well. At least that's how it feels like.

▲stratts 6 hours ago
Except on that page there's immediately a claim that isn't backed up by any of the citations, eg:

"The hunting-safety effect has been substantial. The non-fatal hunting accident rate in the United States fell substantially over the decades following blaze-orange adoption, with state hunter-safety data consistently identifying the orange mandate as a major contributor to that decline."

None of the sources have any national hunting accident data - there's a single link to data from New York, and nothing that would support the claim that state data "consistently" identifies anything...

▲purifyingFlame 19 minutes ago
[dead]
▲gchamonlive 6 hours ago
Does the background colour have a history too?
▲hiccuphippo 7 hours ago
There's no rebeccapurple.
▲bombcar 6 hours ago
We'll get it by Friday.
▲jmatan 6 hours ago
i do like the concept, though the blatantly claude-tinged "italicized word" visual language undermines the author's credibility w.r.t graphic design history imo
▲esikich 5 hours ago
Who cares. As if every website needs to be meticulously hand crafted. You mad at people that use css templates too?
▲encrypted_bird 5 hours ago
> Who cares?

I care. So do they.

▲esikich 4 hours ago
Sounds like gatekeeping to me. They have an interesting idea and story and probably aren't web devs. But you write it off because the design (the least important point of telling the story) doesn't match your sweaty purity test. If anything, these vibe coded projects are the new plain HTML or Angelfire sites that a lot of people here seem to pine for. No one is getting off of your lawn anytime soon. Whining about it is just fucking annoying.
▲nonethewiser 4 hours ago
Agree except I think it actually fits the content of the page. Seems like a natural fit.
▲mm263 6 hours ago
Terrible AI prose
▲ 5 hours ago
▲iberator 3 hours ago
This webpage is nonsense.

First example I saw was already wrong. COBALT BLUE is not known since 1830 but its ANCIENT.

This webpage is some low effort english centric world and wrong and probably just AI slop.