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Through the 6x6x6 Color Cube
Corner to Corner
Select a slice number and background color.
< more white 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 more black >
black | user-defined | white
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Position the cursor over any square to see its hexadecimal code.
Select a square to see text rendered in and placed on the color.
ABOUT THIS DISPLAY
This display was created entirely with table background colors and a single-pixel transparent GIF image that forces table cells into a square shape. To see the colors, you will need to use a browser that displays colored backgrounds in tables, such as Netscape Navigator 3.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 or higher. The pages are optimized for non-graphical browsers as best I can manage: Lynx users, for instance, will see the color names in arrays.
ANY WAY YOU SLICE IT
To visualize the interior of the color cube, I have created these "corner to corner" pages, which represent 16 slices of the cube. Instead of slicing parallel to a face, a common method of displaying the color cube, I slice a corner off the cube, using a plane perpendicular to the diagonal that connects the white corner to the black corner. Instead of actually slicing, though, you may imagine that I remove colored cubes layer by layer from the 6x6x6 cube.
THE VALUE OF COLOR
Because each slice in this display represents a position along the diagonal of the cube that connects white to black, all the colors on any given slice share the same "value" -- a term used to describe the amount of white or black mixed with a color. You may see some patterns in the color codes that reflect this: One pattern is that the sum of the red, green, and blue values is a constant in each slice.
I find that interesting color harmonies are revealed by looking at these slices. Perhaps another "value" of this visualization is that it offers web designers a way of finding colors that work well together. You can view the colors against a black or white background, or define your browser's background color any way you like and view them against that background. In addition, each colored square is linked to a file that displays text of that color on white, gray, and black backgrounds, as well as white, gray, and black text on the color.
ENJOYING YOUR TRIP
In these pages, imagine you are looking at one of the cube faces, with the white vertex in the upper left corner closest to you, and the black vertex in the lower right corner farthest from your eye. When you slice a corner off a cube, a triangular arrangement of cubes is revealed first, which becomes hexagonal, then triangular again as the slicing plane moves through the cube.
To move through the slices, use the navigation items at the top of the page. To see all the slices at once, visit the full palette, but be patient, because rendering consecutive tables takes a while. Enjoy your trip, and e-mail me if you did!
full palette | corner to corner | face to face | about this cube
