As I mentioned in an earlier post of mine, I have to create a color picker, so I’ve already started to write the code for the Color class it’s going to use. I need it to natively support RGB, HSL, Lab and CMYK. And the latter part is causing unexpected trouble.
It seems that there is the notion out there that conversion from CMYK to RGB is easy. Newsflash: It’s not. As every graphic designer knows, the CMYK color gamut is smaller than the the RGB color gamut (even the sRGB color gamut). You can’t take a CMYK color and convert it to an out-of-CMYK-gamut RGB color! That’s nonsense! And it’s precisely what most conversion algorithms and color pickers out there do! Even Adobe Kuler!!!
It was my first presentation ever, actually, the first time I talked to an audience for more than 1 minute 😛 . This caused some goofs:
When introducing myself, I said completely different things than I intended to and ended up sounding like an arrogant moron 😛
I tried not to look at the audience too much, in order to avoid sounding nervous, and this caused me to completely ignore 2 questions (as I found out afterwards)! How embarrasing!
At a certain point, I said “URL” instead of “domain” 😛
Also, I had prepared some screenshots (you’ll see them in the ppt) and the projector completely screwed them up, as it showed any dark color as black.
Apart from those, I think it went very well, I received lots of positive feedback about it and the audience was paying attention, so I guess they found it interesting (something that I didn’t expect 😛 ).
Here is the presentation:
Please note that Slideshare messed up slide #8 and the background seems semi-transparent grey instead of semi-transparent white.
By the way, I also thought afterwards that I had made a mistake: -ms-filter is not required if we combine the gradient filter with Data URIs, since IE8 supports Data URIs (for images at least). Oops, I hate making mistakes that I can’t correct.
As someone who dealed a bit with print design in the past, I consider CMYK colors the easiest color system for humen to understand and manipulate. It’s very similar to what we used as children, when mixing watercolors for our drawings. It makes perfect sense, more than HSL and definately more than RGB. I understand that most of us are so accustomed to using RGB that can’t realise that, but try to think for a moment: Which color system would make more sense to you if you had no idea and no experience at all with any of them?
