SHT
A human-readable format for representing colours as text.
Table of Contents
Background
Being thrusted into the world of design was, and still is, a challenge for me, in large part because my particular flavour of OCD often seems to conflict with established convention. One instance of this that I brushed up against pretty quickly was how designers tended to treat colours, and colour codes (RGB, HSV, etc.) specifically, as almost mystical strings that only the computer should deal with concretely.
My first exposure to these colour codes was quite different: as a child, messing around with programs like MS Paint and GIMP, I taught myself through hands-on experimentation how colour theory worked, and how the strings of hex digits and triples of integers mapped to the various ways of describing colours. Naturally, in choosing these hex digits and integers, I gravitated towards the numbers I thought were "roundest" or made the most "sense", so that the codes would be maximally readable and memorable.
Seeing how designers chose their colours - usually by dragging a cursor around on a colour picker, or hitting "randomize" on a palette generator - was an uncomfortable shock to me. It would bug me to no end every time I saw a colour code like, for example, #0281A9, which I would feel an irresistible urge to change to #0080AA, and it seemed insane to me that this was not a more common experience. I'm someone who likes everything to have a reason, and "this is where my cursor landed" as a reason just didn't cut it for me.
Luckily for me, I had a lot of independent passion projects where I could play by my own rules. By the time I began writing this standard, I was already very accustomed to picking my own colours for things, and I had established a number of loose conventions for doing so, based around reducing so-called "arbitrariness" by choosing round numbers and simple proportions whenever possible. It occurred to me that the subset of colours from which I was effectively choosing was much different than the typical 24-bit subset computers use, for which RGB codes were designed, and it might be fruitful to design a new code convention for these colours that reflected the structure of this subset.
In practice, this SHT standard has been most useful as an "auxiliary" set of definitions I use to more specifically prescribe what colours I choose for various purposes, namely, those with the simplest SHT decompositions. And by simplest, I mean those whose components are least absonant, where "absonance" has a special definition.
Contributing
N/A
License
UNLICENSED