Heuristic for color vileness
Sep. 13th, 2017 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcI notice that text like this looks vile but text like this looks okay. In RGB the color combination of the former is F0F on 0A0 and the latter is FF0 on 00A. This innocent transposition of digits has a marked effect.
I do not know much about color spaces but I suspect that the explanation is the difference in the relative luminance of the two colors. As far as I can tell from online calculators that difference is very small for the first pair of colors and rather high for the second pair. Relative luminance does not seem trivial to calculate; there are various guides that helpfully offer algorithms but unhelpfully offer different algorithms from one another. I appear to have accidentally found a rabbit hole.
I do not know much about color spaces but I suspect that the explanation is the difference in the relative luminance of the two colors. As far as I can tell from online calculators that difference is very small for the first pair of colors and rather high for the second pair. Relative luminance does not seem trivial to calculate; there are various guides that helpfully offer algorithms but unhelpfully offer different algorithms from one another. I appear to have accidentally found a rabbit hole.
