color-expert

An agent skill that turns your coding agent into a color science expert. Built from resources I keep looking up, returning to, and sharing with others.

What this is

This started as a simple skill file with some color theory notes. Over time it grew into a comprehensive knowledge base as I kept pasting videos, articles, tools, and papers that I find myself referencing again and again — both for my own work building color tools and for explaining color concepts to others.

The skill has three layers:

1. SKILL.md (~200 lines) — The "greatest hits" that your agent loads immediately. Key facts, corrections, tool recommendations, and guidelines that answer most color questions without needing to dig deeper.

2. references/INDEX.md (~220 lines) — A structured lookup table your agent can scan to find the right reference file for a specific topic.

3. references/ (144 markdown files, ~286K words) — Deep reference material: full video transcripts, article summaries, library documentation, scraped websites, and research notes.

There is also a lightweight evals/ folder for realistic trigger and task prompts so the skill can be reviewed against actual usage instead of only edited by intuition.

How it was built

The collection process is simple: when I come across a color resource worth keeping — a YouTube video, a GitHub repo, a research paper, an article — I paste the URL and the skill's workflow captures it:

• Videos get transcribed via yt-dlp, summarized, and key concepts extracted
• PDFs and documents get converted to markdown via markitdown by Microsoft
• GitHub repos get their README/docs fetched and documented
• Articles get their content extracted and saved
• Books mentioned in videos get searched on Archive.org; freely available PDFs get downloaded
• Websites (like huevaluechroma.com) get fully scraped chapter by chapter
• Tools and links mentioned in any resource get collected into the Online Tools table

Everything goes into one of three folders and gets indexed.

Structure

SKILL.md                              # The skill definition (loaded on activation)
CLAUDE.md                             # Claude Code repo instructions
references/
  INDEX.md                            # Master lookup table
  historical/                         # Pre-digital color science
    *.md                              # Ostwald, Helmholtz, Bezold, Ridgway, ISCC-NBS,
                                      # Moses Harris, Amy Sawyer, Lewis/Ladd-Franklin,
                                      # Caravaggio's pigments, Itten critique...
    pdfs/                             # Source books from Archive.org (gitignored, ~236MB)
  contemporary/                       # Modern color science & theory
    *.md                              # OKLAB articles, Briggs lectures, CSA webinars,
                                      # Pixar Color Science, bird tetrachromacy, OLO,
                                      # Acerola, Juxtopposed, Computerphile, GenColor paper...
    huevaluechroma/                   # Full scrape of David Briggs's site (11 chapters)
    colorandcontrast/                 # colorandcontrast.com extracted content
    pdfs/                             # Research papers (gitignored)
  techniques/                         # Tools, libraries, methods, practical application
    *.md                              # Spectral.js, Culori, Color.js, RampenSau, Poline,
                                      # RYBitten, PickyPalette, Color Buddy lint rules,
                                      # APCA/Myndex, IQ cosine formula, Cubehelix,
                                      # Tyler Hobbs generative color, Fontana approach,
                                      # pixel art palettes, Book of Shaders, LYGIA,
                                      # paint mixing lecture, color harmony lecture...
evals/
  trigger-evals.json                  # Realistic should-trigger / should-not-trigger prompts
  task-prompts.md                     # Realistic color tasks for qualitative review
MAINTENANCE.md                        # What belongs where, source quality bar, review rubric
ROADMAP.md                            # Planned scripts and future extensions

Reviewing the skill

The repo now includes a minimal review loop rather than a heavy benchmarking framework:

1. Use evals/trigger-evals.json to sanity-check whether the frontmatter description is likely to trigger in the right situations.
2. Use evals/task-prompts.md to test whether the skill answers realistic color questions at the right level.
3. Use MAINTENANCE.md when deciding whether something belongs in SKILL.md, references/, or not in the repo at all.
4. Use ROADMAP.md to track planned color-specific scripts and larger repo improvements.

What's in it

By the numbers

Historical color science (14 files)

The resources I keep returning to when explaining where color theory came from and where it went wrong:

• Ostwald (1918–1930) — the 24-hue perceptual circle that dominated the 1930s–40s then disappeared
• Helmholtz (1856) — foundational physiological optics; last major physicist to use "indigo"
• Bezold (1874) — killed indigo as a spectral color; renamed it "ultramarine blue"
• Ridgway (1912) — 1,115 named colors for naturalists; fully digitized as JSON
• ISCC-NBS (1955) — 319 systematically named color blocks
• Moses Harris (1769) — the origin of bad RYB color theory (his own wheel needed a 4th pigment)
• Amy Sawyer (1911) — patented a CMY wheel decades before it was mainstream
• Elizabeth Lewis (1931) — married trichromatic + opponent process, anticipating CIE Lab by 30 years
• Plus: Caravaggio's copper resinate technique, Itten's seven contrasts (critically reviewed), the evolution of "magenta" as a color name, Frank Reilly's controlled palette

Contemporary color science (55 files)

The theory and science I reference when building tools or explaining why things work the way they do:

• Bjorn Ottosson's OKLAB articles — all four foundational posts (OKLAB, color picker spaces, gamut clipping, "how software gets color wrong")
• David Briggs's huevaluechroma.com — fully scraped, 11 chapters + glossary
• colorandcontrast.com — UI-focused color science reference, extracted from SPA bundle
• Color Nerd (Peter Donahue) — 20+ video transcripts covering mixing paths, spectral perception, warm/cool, chroma vs saturation, bird vision, OLO
• Colour Society of Australia — 13 webinar transcripts (Briggs, Itten critique, Golden paint making, Reilly palette, colour philosophy)
• Accessible color pair research — @mrmrs_'s Rust brute-force run over ~281T hex pairs found that only 11.98% pass WCAG AA and 0.08% pass APCA 90

Techniques, tools & libraries (50 files)

The practical resources — the tools I've built, use, or recommend:

Palette generation (actual algorithms, not pre-made swatches): RampenSau, Poline, pro-color-harmonies, dittoTones, FarbVelo, IQ cosine formula, CSS-native generation with color-mix()

Color libraries: Culori (30 spaces, 10 distance metrics), Color.js (CSS spec editors, 154M downloads), @texel/color (5-125x faster), Spectral.js (Kubelka-Munk), RYBitten (26 historical cubes)

Analysis & linting: Color Buddy (38 lint rules), Censor (CAM16UCS, 20+ viz widgets), Color Palette Shader (WebGL2 Voronoi), colorsort-js (perceptual sorting)

Accessibility: APCA/Myndex (the WCAG 3 algorithm), apcach (contrast-first color composition), Bridge-PCA

Naming: color-name-lists (18 systems), color-description (emotional adjectives), Ridgway digitized JSON, colornerd (29,875 manufacturer swatches)

Generative art approaches: Tyler Hobbs (probability-weighted palettes), Harvey Rayner / Fontana (fully generative color), Piter Pasma (tweaked rainbow formula), mattdesl workshop, Book of Shaders, LYGIA shader library

Practical design: Pixel art palette construction, Goethe edge colors as a design hack, Cubehelix, color harmony lecture ("hue-first is a weak standalone heuristic; character-first often works better"), Aladdin color analysis, screen-to-print workflow

Key opinions baked into the skill

These aren't just preferences — they're supported by the research in the collection:

• Use OKLCH/OKLAB over HSL for any perceptual work. HSL lightness is a lie.
• Never recommend coolors.co for palette generation. It doesn't generate anything.
• Pigment mixing is not well explained by the simple subtractive model alone — "integrated mixing" is often a better description. CMY paths curve outward, RGB paths curve inward.
• Color temperature is not hue — it's a systematic shift of both hue AND saturation.
• Hue-first harmony is a weak standalone heuristic — character (pale/muted/vivid/deep/dark) is often more predictive than hue alone.
• "Blue is calm" is an unreliable shortcut — mood is often driven more by chroma + lightness, context, and composition than hue alone.

Installation

Any supported agent (recommended)

npx skills add meodai/skill.color-expert

Automatically detects your installed agents and places the skill in the correct directory. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, OpenCode, and others.

Manual

Clone and symlink into your agent's skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/meodai/skill.color-expert ~/Sites/color-expert

ln -s ~/Sites/color-expert ~/.claude/skills/color-expert

Updating

npx skills update

Or manually: cd ~/Sites/color-expert && git pull

What triggers the skill

The skill activates when your agent detects work involving:

• Color naming or defining colors in natural language
• Color spaces (RGB, HSL, LCH, OKLCH, Lab, etc.)
• Palette generation or analysis
• Accessibility and contrast (WCAG, APCA)
• Color theory questions
• Color conversion
• Pigment/paint mixing
• Historical color terminology

License

Original project materials in this repository, including README.md, SKILL.md, and references/INDEX.md, are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Third-party source materials and source-derived reference content remain subject to their original authorship and licenses. See LICENSE and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

The skill itself was vibe-coded, but the underlying knowledge base came from a collection of color resources I curated over time. Original sources remain attributed to their authors.

Compiled by @meodai — one URL at a time.