25 Januaray 2019
Updated: 19 August 2019
As of this writing, there are 27,267 named colors (though many names point to the same color definition). The best way to view them is by color set.
The source code and documentation for this project is accessible in my Perl example projects page.
Take note of the next topic. If you have a set of named colors, and would like them added, feel free to contact me. If the colors are not owned by you, feel free to point me to the source and license for those colors.
I run this off of some servers in my house. I have no desire to lose my Internet connection or face a legal challenge because of this hobby site. I cannot afford the time or the money that a legal challenge would bring.
I already know of this source: http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/Dictionaries. I used this as a starting point to get several of the color sets that I use. However, that is an acedemic site, and does not actually deal with licensing in a comprehensive way. More on this later.
Multiple people have approached me with Sherwin-Williams paint colors. Most of those color names are trademarked to Sherwin-Williams (worse, the colors in the file I keep seeing don't exactly match the colors on Sherwin-Williams' own web site). Either way, they explicitly forbid redistribution, so I won't touch that list.
Resene Paints of New Zealand makes their colors directly available on their web site, but they do not explicitly allow re-publishing. The MIT site above also covers Resene, but I note that the file holding the 2010 colors has a 2001 copyright above its open license claim. Resene, themselves, do not include this permissive license on their own site with the sources. I have tried to contact them, since their colors have shown up in certain projects, but I recieved no response. I will not use their colors unless I can obtain a valid permissive license.
What about Crayola colors? I pulled those from W3Schools, and to be honest, I'm not sure if my use here is valid or not. If someone from Refsnes or Crayola asks me to kill this list, I would do so without hesitation. I do know that all Crayola colors are general estimates as the same named color crayon can have differences in shade, tint, or even hue. I include them anyway because Crayola colors are a cultural touchstone, at least in the USA.
All that said, if you have a source of color names that is public with a permissive license, or own legal control of a set of color names, and want me to add them, drop me a note.
12 January 2006 was the initial release of the ColorMix GD example. At that time, there was only the graphic and the RGB menu that would accept decimal values from 1 to 255 in each.
By mid-2006, most of the text colors were added (color, opposite, 10 shades, 10 tints, plus hexRGB suitable for web use). This is the beginning of this page becoming useful to me for my own design work. After this initial work was in, this project was left running, but was not touched for about six years.
Probably late 2012, back when the book, 50 Shades of Grey, was popular, I decided to tweet out 50 Shades of Grey. So, I added the /s: switch to control how many shades and tints would appear. For completeness, I added the /t:, which does the same thing. Anchor tags for #tint and #shade were also added (though no other anchors exist).
During the end of 2016, support for color names was added. Initially, this was only the 752 HTML color names, which originally came from the X11 file, rgb.txt. This file is found on most Unix or Unix-like systems, and was the original source for the HTML named color support list.
On 11 December 2016, The various Wikipedia and W3Schools colors lists were added, and have been updated over time. This is when the /m:colordump mode was added.
The 'ai-' list is here because I found Janelle Shane's Lewis and Quark blog, and I reached out to see if she'd be willing to share. Between 19 and 25 May 2017, I dumped in the first block of AI Colors from Janelle Shane. While she sent me the raw rgb colors from her second blog entry during this time, it wasn't until July that they were finally added to this project.
The XKCD colors were also added at the end of July 2017. This is not the full, raw database of results, but the 949 normalized color set from xkcd.com/color/rgb.txt. I greatly appreciate Randall Munroe's use of public domain here.
On 31 July 2017, all of the color filenames, labels and "credit" paragraphs were removed from the main source, and replaced with a function that can read this information from a configuration file. Only the original 'rgb - X11' definition remains built-in. I was tired of having to update raw structures in the code every time a new colorname file was added. I also did not want to expose the names of files that I'm waiting for permission to use.
Another change on 31 July was the removal of 9-bit. While it was interesting from a visual stand-point, it did not include any names, it was only an indexed listing of colors. And as such, didn't add anything useful or instructive to the site/tool.
During 2018, the page called 8-bit was split into the constituent systems noted on the Wikipedia 8-bit page. These included; apl2, c64, cga, ega, and vic20. Color sets bang, iscc, hollasch, thomas and terminal were also added.
January 2019, I started working on International Flag Colors. As of July this is mostly complete, though I don't think it will ever be 100% complete.
Early August 2019, after years of putting it off, I've finally added HSV values to the output, mostly, because I've started using a program that only takes HSV inputs for precise colors. The graphic (GD) portion was factored into its own Docker service, with all Dynamic HTML functions removed.
19 August 2019, I have fixed a number of JavaScript bugs and enabled Dynamic HTML loading of most of the ColorMixer (info) page. This means that the whole page will not need to reload on every update of the form elements along the top. Changes to the Color List still needs a full page reload, though that should be fixed, too.