Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathgenius | Hacker News Reader

I'm very interested, but also skeptical. How do I know this isn't just fashion ? I would be more convinced if this was backed up by scientific studies, or even just showed examples more than a few years old. What were they doing in the 1960's ? People have done studies showing that fonts with serif's increase comprehension (at least in printed form) of words. Have similar studies been done with colours? Otherwise this article could be complete bs written by someone with a fetish for pastels. Five years from now this same person could be writing about how colours need to have more zing, and reversing all these "not ideal / better" diagrams. Remember when webdesigners went crazy using low-contrast fonts that were barely readable ?

View on HN

The data is indeed pretty thin. I should know, I have looked for it when I was doing my own research on colour use in art. One interesting point... the utility of complementary pairs has a long history. Leonardo Da Vinci was writing about them 600 years ago, and this was before the colour wheel was defined by Isaac Newton.

Exactly the point I came to make. In a blog about data, I would like to see color recommendations backed by research and data, not just the author's aesthetic preferences.

It is art and design. What she is describing is basically super simplified state of art related to colors in out culture and pretty stable. It is simplified for non-designers, but pretty much similar to what they teach when they teach you classical drawing.

Fashion is significantly more limited and changes more often. Not that these basics can not change, but fashion refers to something still less stable.

Yes, the conclusions here are most likely intuitively correct, but the science is missing. One missing piece of the puzzle is probably the grayscale.

GrayScale = 0.299 * R + 0.587 * G + 0.114 * B

Grayscale tells you if the color is for foreground/background - it's something like the weight the color has.

When I had to pick (too many) colors manually I finally automated color picking by using the following rules - and never had to worry about this subject any more.

A) When combining colors it's good to have matching Gray-Values. (Otherwise one will dominate - you can also use this to make one color stand out)

B) Gray value of background and foreground should differ a lot.

C) Colors of similar gray value should not be picked too close to each other (obviously...)

I only skimmed the abstract and this is the first thing I found but it looks like there's a field of research around colour and its impact on attention, arousal, memory, learning, etc.

Maybe some of these references are a starting point, idk.

(warning -PDF link)

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com