alt.hn

6/3/2026 at 9:22:23 PM

Splash Is a Colour Format

 https://www.todepond.com/lab/splash/

by tobr

6/6/2026 at 4:22:53 PM

Mega Splash is the same format but with a unique curve annotation in the 4th digit. And i just made that up and its nelievsble because all encoding schemes are wonky and are extended on a per usecase basis.

by warumdarum

6/6/2026 at 4:09:44 PM

Isn't this just RGB, with 246 of the 256 values removed from each channel?

by Vvector

6/6/2026 at 5:49:50 PM

It's rgb with 3.3 bits per channel, basically 10 bit per pixel color (256 colors is 8bpp).

by Scaevolus

6/6/2026 at 4:22:46 PM

The point is that quantizing the range makes it easier for humans to choose colors. But there's already the #ABC hex format, which while less intuitive to non-techies has the huge advantage of being well-established.

by Sharlin

6/6/2026 at 5:47:58 PM

But it doesn't make it easier for humans to choose colors. For a specific list of detent colors, it reduces the amount you have to memorize relative to full RGB. But to actually reason about colors, you want a non-arbitrary scale; HSV (for instance) gives you hue direction and then you can slide saturation and brightness around.

by tptacek

6/6/2026 at 4:13:05 PM

My other question here is, are "R", "G", and "B" channels the best way to reason about color? Isn't HSV more intuitive?

by tptacek

6/6/2026 at 4:19:09 PM

Or HCL? Or LAB? Any of these are more intuitive than RGB.

by cardamomo

6/6/2026 at 5:30:50 PM

Whenever I needed a color for something digital (website, ...) I would use the Pantone color picker in Photoshop. It had multiple lists of colors (some more vivid, some muted, some thematic - only reds) and I would browse the color I wanted to pick a suitable shade.

I didn't need the Pantone aspect specifically (real world printing), these were strictly digital uses, but I found browsing shade lists much better than trying to use a regular analog color picker (RGB, HSV, ...). Maybe because you see a large color swatch, maybe because seeing 10 different shades at once is and choosing is faster then randomly moving the mouse through the analog picker.

Screenshot: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/how-to-find-and-add-pantone-co...

by dist-epoch

6/6/2026 at 4:38:38 PM

I feel like I kind of get the spirit that this is done in, but it’s just not for me. Abstracting away from the existing 6 digit hex color codes just seems like extra work, even though it’s presented as ‘simplifying.’ It may just be too late for me - I’ve already learned how to express color sufficiently by mixing 256 levels of R, G, and B - it’s not useful to relearn how to abstract that to mixing 10 levels of the same, in a less exact less prescriptive manner.

I AM genuinely glad this person is having fun with the little world they’re creating, and that they’re bothering to share it.

by mock-possum

6/6/2026 at 4:17:53 PM

The site doesn't explain--what's the actual point of this? If we are seriously concerned about characters (which is generally silly in a gzipped CSS) why not just use 3-char hex like #a5c?

by dudeinjapan

6/6/2026 at 4:20:49 PM

Avoiding analysis paralysis, making it more intuitive to manually write colors. But yeah, there doesn't seem to be any advantage over the well-established #ABC format than decimal digits being easier to non-techies.

by Sharlin

6/6/2026 at 4:23:05 PM

The point is to prove that one xkcd comic

by justinator

6/6/2026 at 4:39:38 PM

No, TFA does very deliberately and openly explain what the goal/justification is:

> Splash colours can help you avoid decision paralysis when picking colours. It's an emotional tool that stops you fussing around— trying to pick the "perfect" colour … It also means the user can deal with discrete / individual colour values in the drag-and-drop user interface. They don't have to deal with large numbers at all. Only one to nine

by mock-possum