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Comment on Ask HN: Measuring the Aesthetic Quality of a Set of Colors?

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Aesthetics is a silly metric. We evolved color combination reactions to find food, like fruits in a forest, or to find healthy mates.

Every situation is different. A color palette like on kuler or colorlovers doesn't represent the real environment those colors will be found in. It doesn't include amounts, gradations and lighting, all things our brains evolved to process. For example we need to compensate for changes in lighting on a forest with fruits, because we'll be there at different times of day.

You could develop an objective aesthetic rating for a domain like picking fruits, based on what time of day should you pick a fruit to get the best taste, nutritional content.

Giving arbitrary ratings to color palettes has already been done on kuler and by color theorists, but when the reasons behind the ratings are not understood, you might as well use a neural net to replicate those ratings, using the palettes and ratings as training data. Black box either way.

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