Werner Color Node
I've been having so much fun with my Sanzo_colors node that I decided we could all benefit from another historical color palette node. For this I turned to a project by longtime Nodebox user and data visualizer extraordinaire, Nick Rougeux,
Werner's Nomenclature of Colours was a book of color samples amended and polished by P. Syme in 1821, It, in turn, was based on an 1814 book of colors found in nature, collected and named, by Abraham Gottlob Werner. Werner and Syme's book was especially popular with naturalists and was used by Charles Darwin. A few years ago, Nick produced his spectacular interactive online version and included the source data I used for this node.
Werner_color has four parameters:
- Color Suite. The collection is divided into ten suites: Whites, Greys, Blacks, Blues, Purples, Greens, Yellows, Oranges, Reds, and Browns. You can choose any one of these or stick with the default, All, which returns all the colors.
- Number (0=All). Entering a 0 here returns all the colors in the selected suite; any other value returns a specific color:
- If suite is All and Sort by luma is unchecked, Werner's original color number will be used to select a color.
- If a particular suite is selected and Sort by luma is unchecked, the colors from that suite will be returned in sequential order; 1 will return the first color in the suite, 2, the second, etc.
- If Sort by luma is checked, regardless of suite, the number will return a sequential color from the sorted list arranged from dark to light based on luma value.
- If you enter a number greater than the number of colors available in the given suite, the final color value will be returned.
- Sort by luma. If checked, colors will be returned based on their luma values, from dark to light. If unchecked, colors will be returned based on Werner's classic ordering.
- Output. Choose one of three possible outputs:
- Swatch returns a swatch or list of swatches consisting of a color sample labeled with the color's number and name.
- Color returns one or more colors. This is what you will probably want if feeding the output to other nodes.
- Table returns a data table with one row per selected color. The columns are number, suite, name, color, luma, and swatch.
The attached demo (see screenshot) shows all three types of output: the colors themselves (arranged in columns by suite), a list of swatches for the orange colors, sorted by luma, and a data table of those same orange colors in their original order.
This node provides yet another way to explore colors and apply them to your projects. You can feed them directly into my palette or gradient nodes to produce beautiful spectrums of color. The colors are drawn from animals, plants, and minerals found in nature and can create charming effects.
Enjoy! And please share your creations here on the forum if you can.
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Werner_screenshot.png 566 KB
- werner_color_demo.ndbx.zip 63.1 KB
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1 Posted by abdu on 29 Jan, 2025 08:02 AM
Thank you so much for another gem, John!
Oh, oh, totally got out of my mind; I made Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesgin swatches using your Sanzo_colors node back then. Sorry for doing that without asking, I hope that is okay and legal. I know this forum is dedicated solely on Nodebox projects, so. If this is a no-no, you can delete this post. (.zip is attached.)
If that's okay I want to make swatches of these beauties as well. Gotta use those colors across all platforms. Especially on Nodebox, thanks to you!
Support Staff 2 Posted by john on 30 Jan, 2025 09:08 AM
Abdu,
Glad you are finding this useful.
I don't see any problem with sharing swatches of the Sanzo colors or the Werner colors as long as you're not selling them.
The Sanzo colors were published in Japan in 1932 and the data source I used was open source. The Werner book is not under copyright and Nick Rougeaux freely shared the data files he compiled from it. If you are sharing these on other forums it might be nice If you included a link to Nick's site - which everyone should visit in any case just for the sheer beauty of it.
https://www.c82.net/werner/#intro
I also think it's fine to share resources like this on the Nodebox forum. After all, as you said, they were built in part using Nodebox. The more useful this forum is for our users the better I like it.
Carry on and thanks for sharing!
John