Updated 2026-08-01·View as Markdown

Colorpedia ◉

Every Project on PD carries a colorway — the one color it paints the app in. Colorpedia is what sits behind it: tap the ◉ Colorway tile on a Project's Attributes and the whole book on that color opens.

How: Tap the ◉ Colorway tile on a Project's Attributes to open the book on that color.

①︎ The name — from the fixed dictionary, with the honest distance when the match isn't exact.
②︎ The formats — computed exactly; tap any one to copy it.
③︎ The read — the same maths, in words.
④︎ The harmonies — tap a swatch and the whole card re-reads for that color without closing.

What it tells you

The numbers are computed, exactly, from the color itself. No lookup is involved, so they hold for any color at all — a Project's colorway, or a hex pulled off an Output of art:

HEX · RGB · HSL · HSV — the four everyday ways of writing a color.
CMYK — the uncalibrated screen conversion, the same one a design tool shows next to a hex. A press profile will differ, and the card says so rather than pretending otherwise.
LAB and LCH — the perceptual coordinates, where distance between two colors means what your eye means by it.

Tap any one of them to copy it.

The read puts words to the same maths: the color's family, how light it sits, how pure the hue is, whether it runs warm or cool, its luminance, and its contrast against black and white — the number that decides whether text will actually be legible on it.

The name, and the honesty about it

Color names come from a fixed dictionary of real, documented colors baked into the app — hundreds of them, from the CSS keywords through the pigments, dyes, and heritage colors. Nothing is generated while you are looking at it, so nothing can be invented on the spot.

A color that isn't in the book snaps to its nearest neighbor by perceptual distance, and the card tells you which one and how far away it landed — nearest named color · very close · ΔE 3.1. When the match isn't exact and a history is shown, the card says plainly that it is the neighbor's history, not that hex's own. A color with no story attached shows none; an empty line beats an invented one.

The history

Around a third of the dictionary carries the color's actual story — why Tyrian purple was a capital offense to wear, what Prussian blue was made from by accident, why the CSS keyword green is only half-strength, which color was added to the web as a memorial. It's there when the color has one and absent when it doesn't.

Harmonies

Underneath, the color's relatives, computed on the wheel: complement, triad, analogous, split, and a shades ladder. Every swatch is tappable — tap it and the whole card re-reads for that color without closing. The same goes for the neighbors list: the named colors sitting closest to this one, with the distance to each.

The search

One field at the top of the card, and it reads whichever way you think about color:

a name — cinnabar, tyrian purple, cosmic latte
a hex — #e8ff47, e8ff47, #f00
RGB — 255, 0, 0 or rgb(255,0,0)
CMYK — cmyk(0,100,100,0) or four bare numbers
HSL — hsl(0,100%,50%) or 0deg 100% 50%

Type numbers and the card shows you the color it understood, tappable to open. Type a word and it lists the matching names. Searching never closes the card — nothing you do inside it does. It closes on the ×, a tap outside, or Esc.

From the Command Stone

The same book answers in the Command Stone: color cinnabar, color tyrian purple, a bare hex, or a tagged rgb(…) / cmyk(…) / hsl(…). The stone's card adds two things the modal can't: which Projects wear that color, and the real minted Outputs across every Project that read as it — both tappable straight through to the work.

(The stone's separate stonecolor: command is a different thing entirely: that repaints the stone itself.)