Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

RE: [Icehouse] Xeno color mapping for Homeworlds

  • From"Christopher Hickman" <tophu@xxxxxxx>
  • DateTue, 5 Jun 2007 16:39:57 -0400
David Artman wrote:
>By the way, for what it's worth, it always irked me that green was put
>into Rainbow, making it "the lone secondary" of the set; I'd have put
>in clear and left all the secondaries to be in Xeno along with the
>"lone freak" cyan, which isn't even a tertiary color. Doing so would
>have also added some minor educational value, as the sets could be
>called "Primary" and "Secondary (plus the Freak)".

Ah, but it is. Red, green, and blue are additive primary colors.  Yellow is
the one that's out of place.  If you want subtractive primaries, you'd need
cyan, magenta (which doesn't exist in pyramids yet), and your maligned
yellow.  So now adding the white to the additive primaries and black to the
subtractive primaries, where do you make room for the other colors? We've
assumed a new magenta color and we've left out orange and purple from
existing colors.  I'd say we can assume clear doesn't exist in this
exercise. ;)

Oh, and to actually contribute to this thread, I believe that Andy's
original mapping is the best.

Red -> Orange, Yellow -> Clear are obvious mappings.

Blue -> Cyan means that you have a head-scratcher with Green -> Purple.

Blue -> Purple makes sense looking at the pyramids side by side, and that
leaves Green -> Cyan, which is non-obvious objectively (Dark Blue/Light Blue
thing), but you can make sense of it if you think of Cyan as Blue-Green.

Oh, and for what its worth, I was in James's camp until I actually looked at
them side by side. Academically, Blue -> Cyan seems obvious, but
aesthetically, James's Green -> Purple mapping is jarring (maybe that's why
the Drazi fight their civil war?), and the gestalt of Andy's original
mapping is pleasing.

Topher