Today at Unsung, three efforts with perhaps thought-provoking depth.

The first one: a new website called Storied Colors.

It’s a…

catalogue of [two hundred and fifty] named colors — pigments, dyes, lakes, glazes, and a small number of digital hues — each accompanied by the documentary evidence required to call it by its name.

I wouldn’t normally link to this, as this feels closer to graphic design than UX design, even if the typography of the site is pretty exquisite, and the history of some colors truly fascinating.

What particularly stood out to me about the site that felt worth celebrating was its rigor; there are a lot of cheap color tools and some great ones, but this approaches the subject matter with a different kind of energy:

There are good color dictionaries. There are good histories of paint. There are excellent technical references on conservation chemistry. What is harder to find is one place where the chemical formula, the workshop floor, the trade route, the patent dispute, and the eventual ban all sit on the same page — sourced, dated, and free of the gloss that surrounds color writing online.

Most of what you can read about historical color on the web has been rewritten three or four times from the same Wikipedia paragraph, with the citations dropped along the way. What you are reading here is an attempt to put the citations back.

There’s also this…

The corpus is curated, not comprehensive. There are perhaps a thousand pigments worth knowing about; the launch corpus selects two hundred and fifty whose stories are best documented, most consequential, or most strange. The catalogue is actively expanded; new entries land regularly. Editorial discipline is what keeps the standard honest.

…buyoed by clean information architecture with tags and deep search.

I’d love to see more of that applied to UX. (You might remember that I missed it in the review of the Laws of UX book, which feels on the surface like roughly a similar idea.)

Equally importantly, however, for Color Stories, none of this stands in the way of some beautiful writing:

This is not a forgotten oddity. This is mid-twentieth-century American consumer culture casually serving food on uranium-glazed plates for thirty-five years across two production runs, marketed as everyday tableware to ordinary households, and discontinued only when the second uranium supply ran out. The plates sit in display cabinets across the country, in good condition, still glowing faintly under a Geiger counter.

Kudos to the (anonymous) creator.