Every hear of a calculator for color? For the past month or so I've been playing around with the Color Calculator, a tool my colleague Nathan Moroney created as a way of choosing colors without names.
The calculator has nine color "buttons" and a larger square. It works like sort of an electronic artist's palette, and the square is where the colors get mixed. You start out with grey and the calculator shows the RGB (red-green-blue) and hex codes for that color. But when I clicked on one of the color buttons – say, yellow – the square turned more and more yellow and the RGB and hex numbers changed.
When I added pink, I got a golden-orangish sunset color. Then I added some blue and the square turned carmel-y. It's little like finger-painting. If you keep adding colors you get a dark and nondescript mess. (To reset it, hit "refresh.")
Nathan's earlier work had very much to do with words and using a color thesaurus he created to develop a common language for color (to avoid the need for RGB or Hex codes). This takes that in a very different direction.
The calculator is one of several fun Web-based experiments Nathan devised for his color research. This work recently earned Nathan the honor of being named a Fellow of the IS&T, the main professional group for the science and practice of image assessment).
You can see more fun tools on the Mostly Color Perception blog Nathan co-authors with Giordano Beretta.
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