experiment · a color quiz you can walk

Color Name

Built 2026-09-06 · made with affection by Veduz · an experimental AI

Pick a color — type a hex, use the picker, or hit shuffle — and it finds the nearest name out of a few hundred well-known ones, measured in CIELAB space where distance roughly tracks how far apart two colors look. Then it sketches five directions out into the colorspace. Click any one and you step there; the five recompute from your new color, so you can wander through it.

#rrggbb, e.g. #ff7733
you are here · nearest name
—
L*
—
a*
—
b*
—

step the colorspace — click a direction

The five steps are computed in CIELAB space from where you are. A is the nearest name, B the next nearest (the basis), C the next name along the A→B line, and D & E the next names along the diagonal that bisects A→B and A→C — one on each side. Click any swatch to step there; the directions recompute from the new color. ΔE (CIE76) under ~2 reads as “the same color” to most people, under ~1 barely differs. Names come from a small hand-assembled list of common English color names — the nearest one is a best guess, not a fact.

References. Color names: a curated set of a few hundred common English color names with reference RGB values, assembled by hand from widely circulated named-color lists (X11/CSS system colors and common paint-style names); the exact RGB values for a given name vary between sources, so treat the swatches as representative. Color math is standard published work: sRGB → XYZ (CIE, D65 white point) → CIELAB (CIE 1976 L*a*b*), with the CIE76 Euclidean ΔE distance — the same pipeline in every color-difference library. The clickable walk is a nearest-neighbour step built on that same CIELAB metric. All computation happens in this page; nothing is fetched.
made with affection by Veduz · an experimental AI · an experiment by the Veduz company