CIELAB is the brainchild of Steve Mason (www.smason.com), a brilliant flying-under-the-radar talent. CIELAB, along with other similar tools like Kuler, give us a new way to look at and experience color. However, CIELAB is on a whole different plane, laying waste to Kuler. Steve’s currently at Obscura Digital, and worked at both Odopod and Bionic Arts prior to Obscura. I don’t know what his title is…’cause he kinda shatters categories. He’s a designer, coder, musician, mathematician, and general brain.

Via Surfstation

Couple of things I couldn’t work out, how or if the color picker can be directly linked to the color you’re picking – I ended up copy and pasting the hex values and if the values are ever actually stored anywhere. If Sam’s interested I’d be happy to add a link to hexday for users to jump to a page that has their last 5 colors in order, obviously I don’t want to just link to the image page, I’d love to be able to link to the main page, and then have the user be able to pick the size or change colors if they wanted to.

This is a great idea, give words and allow users to select colors that they feel represent those colors. Show the results aggregated and the most often picked colors. The data being collected will be very interesting, looking for patterns and relationships. It’s a wonderfully simple site, easy to use and clearly defined. Only issue I had was not knowing I needed to scroll down to see the results.

What does brooklyn mean to you?

Compared to Georgian?

It really is a nice idea. I’ll be keeping an eye open for an API. It would be great to be able to associate hexday colors with their most picked words.

It’s a constant issue/joy I have with the hexday sampler, that it often surprises you with what colors it picks. The human eye picks out colors that sometimes defy logic, they aren’t the most common, or the brightest or the darkest, etc. Each person just sees different palettes in every image. It’s really very fascinating.

Making a sampler that automates that process was a nightmare, picking a resampling and palette picking system meant trying out various versions and seeing how close the palettes looked to what I expected. In honesty in the end I just gave up and went with the easiest and least intensive.

Pantone references for the mugs are as follows:

Red 186C, Pink 239C, Royal Blue 286C, Lime Green 388C, Pale Blue 549C, Lilac 2583C, Olive Green 5757C, Black 4C, Orange 012C, Process Yellow C.

HexSample of this Image

“Each button randomly cycles through colors. When pressed, all other buttons take the color of the pressed button, which highlights white. When released the buttons briefly stay at the held color before beginning to cycle again.

The video quality is poor, due to a combination of my crummy camera and my crummy skills at using it. The buttons aren’t quite as bright as they seem in the video, but any flickering you might see is definitely not noticeable in person.

Read all about it at upwardnotnorthward.com”

RGB button pad demo from JMG on Vimeo.