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February 19, 2006

Roy G. Biv is Dead

Whoever came up with 'Roy G. Biv' as a memory aid for remembering color names had to scratch for vowels.

Red, Green, and Blue are necessary, of course as those are the three colors our eyes are 'tuned' to perceive, with all other colors being combinations of these primaries.

Yellow is a good addition, since although it isn't a true primary, it is the brightest color we perceive since both red- and green-sensitive retina in our eyes are stimulated by it, making it appear nearly twice as bright as red or green alone.

So with RyGB we have three primaries and one secondary formed by combining red and green.

If we combine red and blue we get purple, which in some ways isn't a true color since it doesn't appear in rainbows or when white light is shone through a prism.

There is a third secondary color, that appears after mixing blue and green, aqua, teal, cyan, indigo are all in the same ballpark of the spectrum.

Indigo starts with a vowel, so let's use that.

Now we have RyGiBp.

We need more vowels, though.

Orange is a tertiary color, made by combining primary red with secondary yellow, but it's a common-enough color and everyone knows its name, so let's add that.

Roy Gi Bp.

Doesn't look right.

Let's assume that no one remembers what indigo actually looks like since most people aren't involved in textile dyeing nowadays, and let's pretend that indigo isn't a greenish blue but a purplish blue.

Roy G. Bip

And let's change 'purple' to 'violet'

Roy G. Biv

The point is that indigo is actually closer to a teal color and is between green and blue in the spectrum.

In computer color systems, more and more color names are added to libraries so that people don't have to remember RGB hex values, but I've noticed that indigo is being mapped to RGB: 440088, which looks purple to me.

If you look at actual indigo-dyed cloth, as in the undoctored image above, you get a hex value closer to one of these:

Posted by mslaybau at February 19, 2006 10:39 PM

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