Now For A Very Colorful Rant:
Background decorative elements
I felt like the placement of your background images within the body tag to the top and bottom of your main content div is pretty intuitive overall. The only thing I could think of to improve the vines would be to make them pseudo elements (another YouTube video by Kevin Powell) of the body element so that way you don't have to have empty divs cluttering your html for them. Pseudo elements are useful for purely decorative elements because they're created purely out of CSS; no HTML required!
Now for color: below the fold bc hyperfixation go brrr
TLDR: Color contrast is hard; especially with the current color systems we have today (HSB/RGB) since the numeric incantations of popular color systems don't line up with how our eyes actually perceive color, especially when it comes to brightness. Google made a new color system (along with a tool based on that color system to generate color palettes) that lines up better with how humans perceive color but it still isn’t perfect. IMO using tools like palettte.app (with 3 t’s) and hand-selecting colors numbered by how light they are - more about that below - works best and gives projects more of a hand-made feel but Google's tool works well enough for making a quick and professional looking color palette.
Now for a very colorful rant:
Making CSS variables with the format
colorName-brightnessValue
makes it easier to meet contrast standards when coding up a website. I'll usually organize my colors to range from 0 to 1000 exclusive where 0 is black and 1000 is white. I usually use 100, 300, 500, 700, and 900 the most so I have those 5 shades of each main color ready to go whenever I start a new project. (I use the same 4 colors for all my projects so it's easy to copy and paste the colors from the last project into the new one!)
That way if I know my background is violet-100 and my text color is violet-700 that the text will be legible because of the difference in brightness values is 600 just based on the variable names alone. Generally a difference of at least 500 (assuming you go linearly in perceived brightness) is enough to get AAA contrast levels.
For an example, here are my css variables for zephiris.me:
Others do the numbering of the shades differently. Here's how tailwind does it:
Tailwind CSS color guide's section on making a custom color palette has links to some helpful tools on how to hand-pick several shades of a set of colors so that the brightnesses of the colors decrease with the numeric value in a way that actually lines up with people's perception of color.
On that same page, tailwind also has all those color palettes shown above free for you to steal use in your projects!
Google's Material 3 design framework has shades of every color go from 0 to 100 for brightness instead of my 0-1000 brightness or Tailwind's 0-1000 darkness.
Google also has a nice resource which will automatically generate a color palette for you (I like doing it manually with palettte.app [with 3 t's] but if you just need a quick and easy palette that meets contrast standards, Google’s resource works pretty well).
Google actually has a very interesting blog post on why it’s so hard to make accessible colors and get the right amount of contrast with current color systems like HSB/RGB etc.. To fix this, they created a new color system, HCT (Hue Chroma Tone), which helps solve that problem by having HCT's Tone value better match our human perception of brightness.
Wrangling Several Colors to Work Together
My main advice for overall UI design is to pick three colors: a primary color (for background colors), a secondary color (for card backgrounds/text colors), and a tertiary color (for any elements that should be interacted with like buttons and links). I made a site to try out various combinations of colors and share those palettes with others a while ago (apparently November of 2021, thanks GitHub!)
Recently Juxtopposed made a more professional version of what I made called realtimecolors.com along with an accompanying video. Her website also features a palette generator where you just enter in one color and it will generate a set of palettes off that one color!
Unfortunately neither mine nor Juxtopposed's websites support multiple shades of each key color, so to get those additional shades make sure to either use Google's generator or one of the tools mentioned by Tailwind once you have a general set of colors that you feel works well together.
Color Palette Inspiration
What works best for me is to pick colors based on environments which I enjoy to be surrounded by. I based my color palette for zephiris.me on:
the night sky's bluish-purple hue (maybe I wear rose-tinted glasses ok?)
greenish-blue seafoam from ocean waves
golden rays of sun filtering through pine trees
Lastly, I used the trans flag colors to describe my gender for obvious symbolic reasons - I also like being next to a particular shark :p
Conclusion
Meeting color contrast standards can get way easier by numbering your colors based on how light they are. There are plenty of ways to get a set of colors labeled by lightness:
using palettes already made from Tailwind
Have Google do some math wizardry to generate you a custom palette
Use tools like palettte.app to create your own set of colors to play with
Regardless of what option you choose, the overall added structure of numbering colors' brightnesses makes it dramatically easier to make incredibly legible, accessible, and colorful designs.
Colorful rant over!
i like your website! it looks very nice
especially the gradient colored text!! you used a separate font to make it more legible
whenever i try to do something like that, it always becomes really hard to read... maybe i should learn some basic web design?
my website looks like this and it took two days of fiddling with css
Thank you! The biggest thing with making text legible is making sure there is enough contrast between the text color and the background or make the text big enough that it’s legible even if there isn’t that much contrast. The best guide on color contrast that I know of is the Mozilla docs! If you scroll down to the solution part there it has many tools to check text contrast.
Since your website has a warm bright canvas background darker colors and gradients would work better and end up being more legible.
If you’re looking to learn more about web development and especially CSS I strongly recommend Kevin Powell on YouTube! His videos on flexbox and grid are very helpful in understanding those new browser features and making responsive websites (websites that look great on any screen size). For example, I used grid for the nickname table and for my projects so that on desktop those elements would be wider and shorter while on mobile they’d get narrower and taller.
I love your site too, especially the canvas theme with the green branch/orange leaves and the clever span box to show your favorite color complete with a title tag featuring the hex code!
To be clear my site took me at least 20 hours of fiddling and development to make. Feel free to look at the site code (and my commit history) on GitHub!
More Posts from Zephiris and Others
Uhh I’m gonna use this as an excuse to infodump about graphs and fractals and how those two combined help me reason about everything from artistic composition to neural networks to psychology to neuroscience to quantum physics to distributed systems to astrophysics to etc etc etc. I’m calling this theory the:
Fractal theory of Everything
And I’ll probably post a lot of #looooonnnggggg posts about it under the tag “#fractal theory of everything” if you wanna adjust your filters accordingly. This is just the intro post to explain the theory. Actually using this theory to explain everything will be the posts which follow this one.
TLDR located here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DF9lYoQXZbebiIgB071Pv_lHiISCiocuSq-pbubD_xg/edit
Imagine everything as a bunch of nodes (cities, people, classrooms, photons, tumblr users, etc) connected by edges (roads, friendships, paths, quantum strings, followers, etc). This representation is called a graph and you might be familiar with it (looking at who follows me) from math and/or computer science.
This representation of a graph is useful because sometimes a large enough graph is self-similar at multiple scales, meaning when you look at like 100 nodes it looks about the same as when you look at 100k nodes. See percolation which shows why magnets stop working when they get too hot or too cold.
I argue that any graph with meaningful data (meaning not all noise and not all uniform) is an approximation of an n-dimensional fractal. As the graph approaches a more and more accurate approximation of a fractal the data becomes more and more meaningful.
Applied to explain the Double Slit Experiment (one of many applications of this model I've thought of so far)
If you assume that energy is finite (change in the momentum of objects over time) then you start to think about how the universe could possibly exist with its near endless complexity (see fractal graphs from above with their complexity).
My conclusion from energy being finite is that adding a new particle to the universe must scale at most linearly, otherwise adding more particles would make the universe quickly use way too much energy way too fast. Think about a universe where every particle collides to some small degree with every other particle. If you add one more particle to a 2 particle universe then you’ve added 2 more collision checks which is not so bad, right? However, if you add one more particle to a 100 particle universe then you’ve added 100 more particle checks. It becomes obvious that if energy is finite then this is a massive waste of energy for very little increase in scale of our universe. Since intelligent life which can reason about stuff like this can only exist in a sufficiently large universe, there’s a bit of a survivorship bias in that we must live within a universe which scales linearly at worst in order for us to be able to reason about all this, assuming energy is limited.
Since the universe must scale linearly, each particle can only “talk to” the top X most important particles around it for each “update frame” of the universe. (Time is weird though because the universe kind of slows down fast moving objects and my theory is that fast moving objects get more frames compared to slower moving objects but this is even more speculative and hazy than the rest of this infodump. There’s also some weird time shenanigans with looking back through time - see double slit experiment).
Having each particle only talk to their X most important neighbors means that the universe can scale linearly since every particle doesn’t have to talk to every other particle anymore (yay!).
However, limiting the number of edges each particle has also has ramifications in quantum behavior (behavior of particles on a quantum level or dealing with 1 to 100 particles rather than billions).
Basically when a particle only has a few other particles near it in spacetime it’s as though that particle has a weak GPS signal and the particle ends up moving in ways it shouldn’t because the particle only has a few friends to orient itself with. I theorize that the double slit behavior seen with a laser beam entering two slits is due to that particle having to guess where and when it is in spacetime based on the very few particles around it (see math theory of multilateration).
Therefore since the particle can't orient itself it has to guess where it is using probability and some sort of pseudorandom process. This creates the wave pattern seen in the double slit experiment.
honestly getting infodumped to is like. dreamy
there's nothing that melts me more than just hearing someone be passionate about something. And if someone has hurt you in the past and makes you reluctant to fuckin completely go off on the expanded canon of the X-Files or whatever, I'm gonna hit them in the head with a big mallet. You're adorable, show it. Please
the truth is, i do not think that it is useful nor helpful to treat rape and sexual abuse of any kind as singularly evil things that will damage and destroy victims forever and leaves them unworthy of life, and whose perpetrators are also singularly evil people who were born evil and need to be erased from society in order to get rid of rape existing at all. i do not think it is helpful to anybody including victims to tell them that rape and sexual abuse has damaged them permanently and that they have less worth as a human being for having been through that specific kind of abuse/assault. i do not think it is useful to treat sexual violence as completely different from other forms of violence, something that must remain taboo and that has no link to any other form of abuse and violence that might be perpetrated. it is especially not helpful when the very existence of transgender women is treated as sexual violence and a violation to protect cisgender women and children from. it is not helpful when victims of sexual violence are treated as damaged goods, when the sexual violence they've been through is either/both so taboo it cannot be spoken out loud, or something that marks them out as a potential perpetrator of said violence bc they have been forever broken by it.
Hydra head dysphoria is so frustrating frfr
The thing where you improve the look of one thing that gives you dysphoria and then three other things give you way worse dysphoria than you ever had should be fucking illegal.
reblog if you are breaking the sqlite code of ethics
I understand the sentiment “nonbinary people don’t owe you androgyny”. It’s an objectively correct phrase! But…like…I’ve never seen anyone celebrating nonbinary folks who are androgynous? Who are visibly queer? Idk it’s starting so sound less like a breaking of expectations and more of “You don’t have to be one of THOSE queers”
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20, They/ThemYes I have the socks and yes I often program in rust while wearing them. My main website: https://zephiris.me
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