viewtyjoe
@viewtyjoe

This one's just for you, cohost cohorts. If you're on Wobbly Python's Discord, you'll have access already, but I'm feeling nice.

You did what?

So one time while wandering the internet, I fell upon Tuttle Publishing's website whilst looking for technical information on kimono styles, the reasons for which are irrelevant to this post. On top of finding a book with information I was seeking, I found two books: Traditional Colors of Japan and Modern Colors of Japan by Teruko Sakurai. Both books are filled with a number of color palettes, with RGB, hex, and CMYK notation for each color in the primarily 9 color palettes. As a member of the Wobbly Python community, I was struck by a wonderful and terrible idea:

I would make a spreadsheet.

Not just any spreadsheet, though. I'd be digitizing the book's contents and leaving an empty cell with the background set to the actual color each row represents. Essentially, converting each book into a single sheet in a google sheets file which anyone with the link could look at, because picking colors is one of the most awful things to do as an artist.

Thus, I set off, writing some scripting to automate filling the preview cell with the correct background color and doing data entry for the first book. That book has been finished, and I'm a good chunk through the second book, but then the Adobe Pantone incident occurred. I asked myself, "Hey, has anyone gone through the Pantone catalog and just stripped out RGB values? A lot of people don't actually use Pantone for anything but a glorified color picker anyway."

Lo and behold, someone had done it. So I copied the data to a new sheet, and added another 3600 colors or so to my spreadsheet. Then a compulsion came upon me: I would scour the internet for open source listings of color and add them to my sheet. Quickly, I turned up the RAL system and added a sheet for it. Swatchos just has their entire web catalog out there online, so that was another easy sheet to add. Then I found a project for providing a color picker in web apps, and that was the motherlode. They had colors from pretty much every major US home paint manufacturer and a couple of other paint color sources.

After a long night, I found my spreadsheet standing at over 36000 colors (there are duplicates, blame paint brands for copying each other, a lot) available for selection. I still will finish up modern colors, but it's not urgent right now. And as a reward for reading or scrolling through, here's the spreadsheet:


annabelle-lee
@annabelle-lee

using the palette called 'cold autumn dews' from this exhaustive spreadsheet


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in reply to @viewtyjoe's post:

I'm starting a blog where I do a roundup of cool stuff I found and I'd love to include this, but since you said it was semi-secret I figured I'd ask permission first. Would it be ok if I link it? If I don't get a reply I'll assume I oughtn't and won't :)