Topic: Tags for Tertiary and Inbetween Colors

Posted under General

So, I was lurking on the forums and I stumbled upon this thread. There has been an argument that cyan is its own color and should have its own tag, but is currently aliased to blue, and teal to green because of people aren't consistent on what is blue and what is cyan. I support on de-aliasing cyan from blue.

But then, an idea came to me. Since cyan for the most part is a blue-green, what about magenta (a red-violet/pink which also is its own color), indigo, vermillion (red-orange), chartreuse, amber, and other tertiary colors? Where do they go, and should they have their own tags? And what about colors such as ultramarine blue, yellow ochre, olive green, puce, and mauve?

Updated

This has been discussed previously (topic #24113), but it doesn't look like anything was really achieved.

I had a conversion a while ago where I proposed an overhaul of how colour tags should be organised, though I don't think I ever shared it on the forums. Here's a copy of my ideas:

Colour tag structure proposal

There should be a list of "accepted" base colours, any colour-specific tag will have to adhere to these base colours. For example, the base colours could consist of: black, blue, brown, green, grey, orange, red, pink, purple, rainbow, tan, white. Any tag sub-group that is colour-based can use only these colours, any other colour would be considered invalid (not literally invalid). This only applies to specific colour tags, other color based tags such as two_tone aren’t covered by this proposal.

These tags generally have a colour prefix, and an object suffix. An example of a colour-based tag sub-group is colored_nails and its sub-tags. Tags such as black_nails, green_nails, and purple_nails would be valid, but gold_nails would be invalid.

This wouldn’t require too much work to implement as most colour sub-groups already informally follow this structure. During the implementation, these colour sub-groups will be examined for compliance. Whenever a tag with an invalid colour prefix is found, it is aliased to the closest equivalent base colour prefixed version of the tag (e.g. gold_nails -> yellow_nails).

I believe this will be simple for most cases, though there will almost certainly be situations that would require some debate before it can be decided what is the correct "closest equivalent base-colour". While cyan may be an obvious equivalent to blue, colours such as amber may be more difficult as it is close to both yellow and brown. When a decision is made to alias a particular invalid colour to a valid base colour, the alias should be noted and applied to other colour sub-groups to maintain consistency. For example, if gold_nails is aliased to yellow_nails, then every gold_* tag in every other sub-group should be aliased to their yellow_* equivalent.

I'd say we should have no more color tags than the headers of the sections for Wikipedia's List of colors by shade
I'm not saying that we should use the these colors specifically I'm just saying that it's a good number of colors. I think pink and magenta are similar enough to keep as the same thing for tagging and also I think that tan is prevalent enough to deserve it's own tag.

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darryus said:
I'd say we should have no more color tags than the headers of the sections for Wikipedia's List of colors by shade
I'm not saying that we should use the these colors specifically I'm just saying that it's a good number of colors. I think pink and magenta are similar enough to keep as the same thing for tagging and also I think that tan is prevalent enough to deserve it's own tag.

I would agree upon that. Though in some cases, darker shades of magenta would come off as purple/violet than pink.

I'm thinking about renaming the thread from "Tertiary colors" to "Transitional colors". I could talk all day with tertiary colors alongside indigo, maroon, peach, human skin colors, and several shades of purple named after flowers.

Honestly I do look forward for the return of teal_* and cyan_* tags, they do seem distinct enough.
Not sure about amber_* though, since amber_eyes is the only tag using this colour prefix.

alexyorim said:
maroon

One of my favourite examples is typing burgundy vs maroon into Google images and seeing it swap them around in each result.
Shades and in-the-middle colours are probably too much of a loose abstract in most peoples' understanding to be useful for tagging, or at least should be groups instead of individual tags.
eg. teal and cyan -> tealcyangroupname

magnuseffect said:
One of my favourite examples is typing burgundy vs maroon into Google images and seeing it swap them around in each result.
Shades and in-the-middle colours are probably too much of a loose abstract in most peoples' understanding to be useful for tagging, or at least should be groups instead of individual tags.
eg. teal and cyan -> tealcyangroupname

I still get confuse by burgundy and maroon sometimes, yet I know which is cyan/tuquoise is...

If anything, should indigo be part of blue (like the original dye) or should it be part of purple?

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