And here we see the ultimate extension of the web designer's aesthetic into the realms of the absurd: colours, artfully chosen and arranged; a Flash (?) interface allowing exactly one interaction, of utter triviality. And because it would no doubt ruin the perfection of simplicity, nothing to explain what it's for, why it exists, what will happen if you click Reload, and so on. No doubt part of the reason the site is being so hammered at the moment is because people are reloading over and over, trying to make it do something different.
Very odd indeed. And not the good kind of odd. Just odd.
God forbid anyone ask you to figure something out without spelling out every little detail. Hang on, the site's creator isn't even asking you to do anything. He or she just put something out there. Perhaps they are not even the person who posted it to hn. And even its freeness and obvious toy-ness isn't enough to prevent shrill, shallow complaints from annoying people on hn.
There's plenty of feedback within the app. You click on something, it says copied. The dropdown is obviously a set of color formats. It was not terribly hard to figure out.
But no explanation of what the colours are for, where they're from, what happens if you hit Reload. My assumption was that there was some clever algorithm to choose a "nice" set of colours from a wide palette, not that it was little more than a single colour swatch.
As I said: too minimal.
Now, if someone did have a web app that would choose nice colours that go well together according to clearly-defined, documented algorithm, I'd be very happy with that. As long as there was some text somewhere to explain what it did.
I don't get why he would document what happens when you hit reload. The page reloads. The colors are all the same and can't be adjusted, so obviously it can't be met to be a means of choosing colors. Where did you even get these expectations from?
I had to check out the comment thread here to figure out what that page actually did. I'm still not clear on the purpose of the dropdown at the top? Is it supposed to load multiple pallets or something? If so it appears to be broken at the moment.
It's supposed to allow you to change the format that the colour is copied with into your clipboard, i.e. hex or RGB.
It's a shame really since it'd be relatively easy to fix. Off the top of my head you could change the text string for the default drop down to "Select a copy format". Moreover you could actually say "copied to clipboard" (or any suitable variations) when clicking on a colour / have some text on the page stating "Click on a colour to copy it to your clipboard".
I'm not sure if the site's creator changed the site since this post, but I believe the site is responsive. When expanded wide enough, I saw a "Why?" button that when clicked explained the site's purpose.
I do get your point. I have played around with the site and there's a part of it I still don't understand. :-/
I guess this is mass media gone nuts: When you aim for the lowest common denominator, but your target audience is every human being on the planet, you end up serving nothing at all.
It also doesn't seem to do anything. I click on stuff and it says "Copied!" but there's nothing in my clipboard. Unless I'm not understanding what "copy" means...
Haters gonna hate. I like it. Those are so similar to the colors I use, not too saturated, not too dim, not too bright, not too loud. (And it's hard to find a good yellow)
It's not made for the average person it's made for people who understand design and don't need explanation. It's a micro-web-app. Click on the colors to copy them to the clipboard. That's it.
Man, are you guys going to criticize him/her because they didn't have a call to action button? There's a time and place for those things, and a time and place for these micro-web-apps.
If you guys keep shitting all over people's side projects they're going to stop posting them here. The goal is constructive criticism.
Good UX should be intuitive, if you've done it right you don't need to explain what it does. The fact that so many people are utterly confused by this site shows that clearly it wasn't done right. If it isn't intuitive that's fine, it can still be good UX, so long as you add proper explanation, context, and callouts to make it obvious what the various interactions are. This site is neither obvious, nor does it have proper callouts to explain the interactions, which is why everyone is so confused. In short, it's bad UX, on top of a tool of questionable use to begin with. It's a single fixed color swatch. It would make a nice component on a larger site, say one of the myriad ones that allow you to select from a large collection of user submitted pallets, but as a standalone it comes across as kind of a flop.
If you post something you've done here, it's because you think you've created something others will find useful/interesting in some way. If it turns out that most people don't that just means you were wrong about how useful/interesting you expected it to be. You can do one of two things then, either try to fix/improve your effort and re-submit it later on to hopefully better result, or else abandon the idea and try to come up with something better. Either one is fine. What you can't expect is that people will heap praise on something they consider either boring, useless, or flawed in some way. The fact that people are taking the time to call out any perceived flaws is a service to the creator, its up to them to read others opinions, evaluate them, and decide how they want to react to them (either by accepting them as valid criticisms and working to fix it, or else rejecting them for whatever reason).
Ultimately if your "side project" isn't in a state yet to be evaluated by a large readership it probably shouldn't be posted here unless you're looking for feedback on how to fix it. That's the purpose of a site like this, it's to aggregate/discover interesting content, it isn't a dumping ground for every half finished project on the internet. I've got dozens of "side projects" that I'd never dream of posting here because frankly they aren't worth wasting peoples time with.
“I like it. Those are so similar to the colors I use, not too saturated, not too dim, not too bright, not too loud. (And it's hard to find a good yellow)”
OP didn’t choose the colors, they’re copied from Flat UI (hence the name of the site).
Funnily enough I blindly clicked the site and immediately knew what it did and what it was for. I don't see the UX fail here. it's actually very good (to me)
What's with all the negativity on HN lately? Not getting the hate really. The site looks good and the UI makes it feel like a game - fun to use and there's not really a lot to 'figure out', come on. Useful or not and (design) educational values aside, the creator enjoyed making it.
it was not even a side project for me, the thing is I was obsessed with these colors and started to use them a lot, and got bored of the copy - paste progress. I did it because it was useful for me and I shared for those who like the flat ui color as much as I do and I didn't know that it was going to drew this much attention.
now moved a cloud server, hope DNS changes will affect soon.
at least it was fun to create some mini app mentioned in the hacker news :)
Minor bug report: when I open the 'What da copy?!' dropdown at the top and don't select anything but hover on a color, then hover on the second or third item in the dropdown again (coming from below the dropdown), there's no highlighting of the dropdown items and clicking selects the 'peter river' color. Something to do with z-index maybe? I am using the latest Chrome beta.
Also: hovering on any of the colors in the bottom row brings up the vertical scrollbar.
If a separate website with a separate domain name is going to be created for every color palette (http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes), we might have to speed up the ipv6 migration.
While I appreciate the effort that went into this (and keeping in mind that taste is indeed a very subjective thing), I just don't feel comfortable with this corralling of styles and colors. I get the impression that there's some uniqueness, and maybe even a bit of quirkiness, lost when the web adopts a uniform.
I wonder why they've used Flash. Flash is obsolete right now for these kind of things. A waste of time, IMHO, specially if you want to do this kind of simplicity UI and interaction, why the heck you will choose Flash over JS.
Coincidently I came across this a few hours ago from http://designmodo.com/flat-design-colors/ when looking for some quick and easy flat colour palettes for an iOS application.
It is no doubt initially confusing, I clicked a colour but had no idea it had copied to the clipboard. Furthermore when it wasn't apparent what the top drop down menu actually did when you didn't know about the copying functionality.
Regardless, in the end I got the colours I wanted. Had no idea they were the same colours as from the flat-ui package.
I still think making a website for just 1 style is a bit, useless. What if I do just one website saying "Art Deco colors" featuring a miserable color palette of 12 colors. It's just crap utility for any good designer.
I love colors, I personally own 6 o 7 color books with thousands color patterns for working on specific designs. But this, this is just 1 color palette and not the only one you can use on "flat designs".
Sorry but the website fails, show me thousands, not 1.
The only colors I'd really recommend taking from this are Sunflower and the Midnight blues. The greens and blues and purples are all too safe. They look like defaults, like choosing "red" in CSS for one of your brand colors. Like someone else in the comments said, they are "not too saturated, not too dim, not too bright, not too loud". And although he used it as a compliment, it sounds like a failure to me. You don't want all of your colors to live in the same value and saturation spaces; that's boring.
Can any designer out there speak to how these colors are chosen? It seems to me that it'd be a matter of taste more than anything else, but if there is some trick to choosing better palettes I'd love to hear it.
That's a very unproductive and mean comment. If you have specific criticisms, post them.
If you think your criticisms are so obvious that they don't need saying, then don't say anything. If you think that, but the post stays on the front page, well, you were wrong. The criticisms did need saying. So post them.
Used to be called the Slashdot effect; nowadays you see it more in reference to Reddit. There should be a name for it that doesn't need to change every time a new web link aggregator becomes flavour of the month.
Incidentally, whatever it's called, "hacked" is not the right terminology. Whether you're of the belief that "hacker" means "programmer" or "evil nasty person", this doesn't qualify for the term.
Very odd indeed. And not the good kind of odd. Just odd.