Nippon Colors
Um... can someone explain a bit what I'm looking at?
This is not a well designed website. The names of the colors aren't even searchable (because it's not actual text), and unless Japanese people read roman letters differently than we do, letters rotated 90 degrees is awful for readability and should never be used. Text color is also never adapted to background color, pick "Sakura" for example and the white foreground text is completely unreadable.
This is super cool.
It's interesting that a lot of color names listed here are pointing to actual things. Just like in english we'd have the "orange" color backed by the average color of oranges.
I also think they would only be used in phrases with the "xxxx color" cosntruct, and not as we'd say "blue" or "green". For instance azuki is a popular grain, so you'd say a shirt is "azuki color" and not just "azuki" IMO. That makes is a bit of cheating, as then anything can be set as a color, for instance "UPS color" or "post box color" or "Xbox death ring color".
But I guess our very history with naming colors is very ad hoc anyway.
I have no idea what that site is about but the clicking the button on the right making the stuff fly around the screen was pretty cool.
When I was a young'n hacking up little websites and personal projects 10 years ago I would always refer to nipponcolors.com for color ideas. Glad to see it's still online
"This site is optimized to Safari."
There's something I never thought I would see.
Having known perhaps less than 20 colours for my whole life, this collection is eye popping. And the design of website is perfect too
I think the many comments griping about this site's layout/readability/accessibility are missing the fact that it was made in 2010 - a time when HTML5 was relatively new, many modern web features didn't exist yet, and Flash was very much the norm for artsy dynamic sites like this.
As such, judge it for what it is - an art site trying to push the bounds of HTML at the time. It clearly wasn't made to maximize readability, and folks complaining about the color names not being searchable are hugely missing the point.
I actually prefer this instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/nipponnoiro/
It's the same concept, but one color for every day of the year. It's a lot more browsable/readable, though it's not searchable at all and has no romaji.
I've always found it interesting that the Japanese use the character 赤 generically for the colour red but Chinese speakers use the character 紅. When they both refer specifically to different shades and tones of red and speakers of both languages would know the specific meaning of both characters.
A lot of them are named after tea. Is or was tea really that influential in Japan, or is there just a strong correlation between tea and colors? I have been to a tea market just once and I can only guess that color would be a quick way to tell them apart since they all look similar.
If you look at gofun, (https://nipponcolors.com/#gofun) it makes you wonder why the text color doesn't change to black to maintain contrast.
Here's a version of the same colors (with no romaji or animation) that might be easier to use.
May I please have localized left to right reading?
So many ideas for personal project names lol
The time to swap between colors is killing me. I want to move through them quickly.
Color component coordinates are meaningless without an associated color space.
This is a cool site. The 3D rendering looks cool.
Fun fact: In Japan the bottom color of traffic lights is called blue (aoi), not green (midori).
resubmit all good but (2010)
itt: angloids crying about the internet not being fully catered to their underdeveloped brains.
Is "you have to twist your head 90 degrees" some kind of new web aesthetic I haven't heard of?
This is a beautiful looking site but is decidedly designed for Japanese readers. I will leave cultural commentary aside. While the romanized names are large, they are incredibly awkward to read being rendered vertically with rotation. I would recommend rendering the romanji vertically without rotation or using a Western left-to-right rendering. While I have some rudimentary Japanese reading skills, lack of furigana above the kanji color names further limits the readability.