Talk:List of Crayola crayon colors

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Date need to Change[edit]

Can someone change the retrieve date of Midnight Blue and Tan to 03 April 2019 ShnRvs Unicorn 147 ShnRvs Unicorn 147 15:27 (PST)

Page is incomplete[edit]

because color Golden Ochre is absent. Yoozr (talk) 19:04, 18 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Smelled vs smelt[edit]

I wonder if it is a regional thing in the US, I'm from the east coast and was grew up with smelt and smelled having different nuances. In particular things that emitted odors, "smelt" or sometimes "smelled of" and things that sense them, "smelled". Note for the Merriam-Webster link to smelt, they don't appear to have separate pages for conjugations. The page for smell list both smelled and smelt. PaleAqua (talk) 02:02, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"Fluorescent" colors?[edit]

Do the pigments actually fluoresce, or does this just mean that the colors are especially saturated or vivid? 108.228.8.110 (talk) 18:22, 27 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

They fluoresced under black light. Or still do, I assume, if they're still being made. P Aculeius (talk) 20:05, 27 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
That should be clarified- whether or not they're still in production.
-AAEexecutive (talk) 18:24, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

General issues with this page[edit]

I'm concerned that this page is becoming too detailed and convoluted to be quickly understandable and useful. There are a number of reasons for this.

  1. The page is titled "List of Crayola crayon colors," but it's become a history of Crayola crayons, which is greatly complicated by the profusion of specialty crayon types and changing names. Currently there are fifteen different subsections, each with its own table and pictures, in addition to the two main color tables. This doesn't even include the fluorescents, which are included in the main tables, or the fabric crayons. In addition, the majority of citations in the lead are to Crayola itself, and in one case to a journal with a picture of a vaguely-worded Crayola ad, which a scholarly site on Crayola crayon history demonstrates is inaccurate.
  2. The table titled "120 existing colors" has several problems.
    1. First, the numbering system has no basis in history or Crayola's own usage. It's based entirely on the colors listed in alphabetical order, and as such is superfluous in sorting.
    2. Perhaps it would be better for the colors to be shown in order of hue, rather than mixed by alphabetical order. That would make it easier to compare related colors. Sorting by color codes is less useful since doing so necessarily prioritizes one color component at a time.
    3. Pack added isn't really that useful, since throughout Crayola's history, different colors have been available in packs of different sizes, which are subject to constant change, while specialty packs are produced all the time. Even though it's possible to say that certain colors are only likely to be found in a box of 64 or more crayons, the number of different packages being produced makes it impossible to keep this accurate. This would be a useful feature if we had a section or article on each box size and its contents, but I don't think it's important enough to justify the column here.
    4. The Notes segment is out of control with alternative names for the majority of colors. A good color swatch can be achieved with one or two lines in the table. But because some of the colors have been included in so many specialty sets with alternate names, each color's entry is a different width, with some of them stretching for eight, nine, ten lines or more (depending on window width), while others are just one. I believe that it's counter-productive for the table to try to include every "fun name" used in every specialty pack.
    5. The Munsell colors require additional explanation and probably should be separated from the rest, except to the extent that they were incorporated into the regular Crayola line.
  3. The table titled "50 retired colors" has its own problems.
    1. Most of the colors listed were never "retired" by Crayola. Crayola's web site only alludes to the retirement of eight colors in 1990, and four more in 2003. The other colors in this table may no longer be manufactured, but they aren't officially "retired."
    2. I have no problem with the RGB or Hex codes in principle, since those on the main table are clearly based on values found on Crayola's site, and so may be considered semi-official (RGB codes being directly convertible to Hexadecimal). But many of the codes can't be obtained from Crayola, since they refer to colors that haven't been produced for decades, and have probably never been found on their web site. Where do these come from? If based on color swatches or the apparent color of the wax, they should at least indicate that the values don't come directly from Crayola.
    3. Even though CrayonCollecting.com (which is generally a good, scholarly site on the topic, despite not being cited as a source in this article) lists "Maximum Black" as one of the Munsell colors, that name isn't found on Munsell boxes or wrappers, and doesn't really make any sense. The boxes say, "...five principal hues and five intermediate hues at maximum chroma with middle gray and black." On Munsell wrappers, the name is "Black." Since black is achromatic and doesn't have any grades of chroma, it makes no sense for there to be a "Maximum" Black; there was no "Middle Black" and there could not have been.

I've been thinking of ways to remedy some of these issues, but since there are several active editors on this article, I didn't want to undertake a major revision without consultation. One question I'd like to put to the editors is whether it would make sense to separate the historical aspect of the page from the list aspect, and perhaps produce an article on the history of Crayola crayons. Different time periods could have tables showing the exact color palette then available, which might be helpful. It would also be possible to display the Munsell colors separately.

Does anyone have some thoughts on how best to narrow the scope of the article, or improve the main tables, which I'm sure are of the greatest interest to readers? P Aculeius (talk) 13:09, 30 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Are any of the voluminous notes accompanying the many colors sourced? Per our guidelines, none of this is acceptable otherwise. Whether or not there are editors with a long term active interest, there is no rationale for keeping unreferenced content, especially noticeable here, where it's taken over the bulk of the article. Uncited or poorly cited text must be removed. 2602:302:D88:23E9:CED:FA96:F7A8:DEE8 (talk) 11:31, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That's not quite Wikipedia policy. Unsourced statements may be challenged, and if no source can be identified, they may be removed. But they don't automatically get removed merely because no source has been cited. The more usual interpretation of policy is that notes requesting better source attribution may be added to an article, giving editors ample opportunity to find and identify sources. That may or may not be the best approach here; many articles await better sourcing for months or even years. Possibly restructuring the article would achieve the desired result.
Now, I can see three main sources for most of the color names and values, which would clearly satisfy sourcing requirements for the majority of information on this page. First, the names of the colors can be established from crayon wrappers, or occasionally boxes, where the wrappers are unavailable. Although the wrappers would be primary sources, they're perfectly adequate as evidence for the names of the colors. For that matter, the crayons themselves are appropriate sources for their own appearance and colors. Anyone can look at a crayon or color a swatch of white paper with it and describe the color produced. The visual depiction of that color, described in RGB values or hexadecimal codes, could rest on nothing more than what anybody can observe by examining the crayon in question, and this by itself is adequate for that information.
But much of the information on this page can also be attributed to digital color swatches directly from Crayola. Crayola's web site includes a page with swatches of all colors currently in production, as well as some that aren't currently being made. The swatches are solid-color, not composites, and have fixed RGB values, which anyone can accurately interpret using the page code or a digital color meter. I checked the values on the page the other day, and all the ones I could find on the current Crayola site matched perfectly. Not off by one or two digits, but exact matches. So as far as these swatches represent the "official" depictions of Crayola colors in digital values, they're adequately sourced. The Crayola page has changed from time to time, and I suspect that some colors previously derived from its values can no longer be found there, but they were published and could be considered provisionally sourced, as long as no contradictory evidence comes to light.
It's perfectly true that two people can look at a color and see different things. To some extent this is definitional; for example whether you look at a swatch of teal and consider it green or blue. That's not really a problem with this page, since it doesn't attempt to resolve ambiguous identifications. But some people see the world a bit yellower than others, and some people redder; and of course some people have limited (or possibly enhanced) color vision. But as long as the representative color samples and their equivalent RGB or hexadecimal values are described as "approximate," with an appropriate note, I think that the concept of depicting them based on appearance is appropriate under Wikipedia policy. If someone comes along and says, "that's not how Maize looks," that editor is entitled to attempt to improve the depiction (subject to the opinions of other editors, the same as improving the clarity of a sentence).
So, we have the crayons themselves, and the boxes they came in, as adequate sources for their names and approximate colors. We have Crayola as a published source; while there are genuine questions as to it's reliability with respect to company and color history, it should be all but definitive as to the names and colors of its crayons, since it produces the crayons and the wrappers bearing their official names. A third source which really should be identified and cited on this page is the web site "CrayonCollecting.com," which has a well-researched history of Crayola crayons in multiple parts. The author has collected dozens, perhaps hundreds of boxes of Crayola crayons from all different eras, and reported what their contents were at different points in time, together with representative swatches of many colors no longer made by Crayola. This allows for critical evaluation of Crayola's statements and omissions respecting the history of its colors. It's not necessary to take every statement that the author makes as indisputable fact, but the history is reasonably scholarly and well-written, and seems to be generally supported by the physical crayons. So unless a particular statement is obviously mistaken or contradicted by other reliable evidence, it ought to be taken as a good source on the topic.
Personally I think that the best solutions for this article would be either to rewrite the existing text and use the tables mainly as illustrations, rather than the primary content, perhaps splitting off specialty crayons and eliminating the voluminous alternate names for various crayons that were only used for one specialty set, and streamlining the notes section generally; or to create a separate article on history, with or without tables. P Aculeius (talk) 12:51, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Spent some time working on possible tables that could be used to put this list in historical context; since different colors were available at different times, and that seems to be a major focus of the article, it might make sense to show the main selections available at different points in time together. Not entirely satisfied with the results yet.
One thing that confuses me a little has to do with the color codes. I thought these came directly from Crayola's web site, or at least were checked against a color meter using Crayola's web site. That'd be perfectly acceptable and not original research; making a color swatch to represent how a color looks isn't that different from drawing a picture of something to use as an illustration, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I thought I'd looked up several of these colors a few days ago and found matching color meter results from the Crayola site. Tonight I checked to see which of the colors could be attributed to Crayola's official swatches, and out of the first eight colors I checked, only one showed the same values as Crayola currently does. There was a clear pattern; most of the colors are currently depicted paler than on the Crayola site. I'm now beginning to think that either these RGB codes are from an older source, or that they're made up and not attributable to Crayola.
My first reaction was, "oh, no, they're all fakes and need to be re-done from scratch." But it occurs to me that if some of them are approximations based on real swatches, rather than Crayola's digital versions, that'd be alright. If someone doesn't have a "definitive" value for a color, eyeballing it and trying to reproduce it in RGB should do as a stop-gap; that is, until something more "official" can be located. But it's clear that a lot of these colors don't come directly from the Crayola site. In fact a lot of the depictions are questionable; the maize one in particular caught my attention, because I made my own swatches a few weeks ago, hoping to scan them and use them to get precise values. That didn't work out so well, as they didn't all scan close to the actual color. But I was astonished by the fact that maize turned out to be bright golden, when from the solid crayon you'd expect it to be rather brownish. The table here shows it as pale beige, which is definitely wrong. If I'm going to fix this, I'll need to check every one of the RGB codes against the Crayola swatches. P Aculeius (talk) 04:22, 6 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that this page has become something other than its intent. As of now, it is difficult to find a color without knowing the edition it came in. The page made much more sense when it was a single table, with all Crayola crayons listed. Editions should be a column header, allowing one to sort by that if they so choose. Editors who wish to detail about the Crayola editions should create an article dedicated to that. The intent of this page is to be a list of Crayola crayon colors and it is currently not that. Evansvilleace (talk) 09:50, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've split the history section off into a different page, which was one of the options I suggested back in May. The table now shows all of the standard colors, although each one is sortable under only one name (although large percentage have at least one alternative name, and some names are shared by multiple colors). The dates of production are listed under "notes" but could become separate columns. I hesitate to add that feature, because I think the table is already complex enough. P Aculeius (talk) 05:16, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposals to re-organize this article[edit]

A few weeks ago, I mentioned some problems with the organization of this article, and asked for some ideas to revise it. My first thoughts had to do with the improving presentation of the main color charts, perhaps following order of hues instead of alphabetical order, possibly incorporating a chronological aspect, and reconsidering the so-called "retired" colors, which until recently weren't separated out in their own section, and which seemed to have numerous other issues.

In the process of considering this, I decided to make some chronological charts using my sandbox, organizing the colors into groups based on major phases of Crayola history, when significantly different color assortments were available. As I was doing this, I followed the history and color swatches documented at CrayonCollecting.com, which I've come to conclude has been a major source for the current article, even though it's not cited anywhere. I found a number of mistakes identifying colors, and obvious differences between the colors presented on the charts in this article and swatches of the actual crayons. These were most pronounced with the "retired" colors, which raised the question of how the color values in the table were arrived at.

I mistakenly believed that the color values given on this page were found at Crayola's web site, since I know it did have information on a lot of colors at one time, and the article cites Crayola.com for them. But I was suspicious of the values given for colors that haven't been produced for several decades. When I finally got around to checking Crayola.com for colors that could logically have been found there, I discovered that very few of the swatches offered matched the color values on this page. A possible culprit is age; until this January the article said that the color values came from Crayola in 2009. Then National Names 2000 changed it to say that they were currently provided by Crayola, which is false.

I wrote down all of the values for Crayola's swatches. Very few of them related to "retired" colors, so the source of the values in this table is unknown. Since few of the colors correspond precisely to Crayola's swatches, and there are no sources for individual color values, I don't consider any of them reliable at this point. Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that National Names 2000 has invented information about crayons that never existed; I just reverted an edit referring to colors called "light brown" and "light chrome brown," which are complete nonsense. I'm reasonably sure that he's been editing this article under a variety of aliases for over a year, and that he's currently blocked from editing under the names "Caidin 2000", "Caidin Johnson 2000", and "Caidin C", one of whom previously added a group of imaginary colors called "Caidin 15th Anniversary colors."

Since the colors are all suspect, and some are obviously wrong, their organization is poor, the division into current and retired sections is questionable, the identification of colors used at different times includes many mistakes, the hundreds of "fun" alternative names used on single occasions are clogging up the tables, and the article is now cluttered with seventeen separate tables for various specialty crayons, I think it's time to put forward some proposals for restructuring this completely.

  • First, I'd like to split off all the "specialty" crayons into one or more separate articles. It's harder to manage, understand, and patrol articles like this when there are so many separate topics. Right now there are two tables for all the "regular" crayons and fifteen for specialty crayons, most of which have only been produced for a short period of time, and which are familiar to only a few crayon users.
  • Second, I'd like to replace the main tables with a chronological sequence, showing the assortments available during major periods of Crayola history. In particular, the original 1903 lineup, the 48-count box introduced in 1949, the 64-count box introduced in 1958 (which featured the same assortment from 1958 to 1990, and still features most of the same colors), and colors introduced since 1990; possibly subsidiary tables showing the Munsell assortment produced from 1926 to 1935, which was incorporated into the regular lineup until 1949, and which introduced the color wheel concept which Crayola adopted and then expanded in 1958, which might also merit a subsidiary table.
  • Each table would be organized by hue, beginning with red and running through purple, with pinks, browns, and neutrals following from there, also in order of hue; I've tested this and it seems to work well, since most of the pinks fall into the purple range; and the browns, being darker versions of reds, oranges, and yellows, naturally come after that. Black and white would need to come at the beginning or end, since their hue is 0, while the logical place for grey is between them. This layout makes it easy to see how related colors differ from each other and grade into others.
The tables would also be sortable by alphabetical order, hue (from 0 to 359, rather than from red, which is actually about hue 346, to purple, with browns and neutrals separated out), saturation, value, or by amount of red, green, or blue. There'd also be a hex code equivalent, like in the current table, which would also provide source references (whether each color comes from Crayola, or from a physical swatch of the color), and a notes section. This would only be used for important information, such as major variations in a color's name (not a dozen "fun" names used once each in specialty packages), or dates that the crayon was introduced, discontinued, or renamed.

Now, it could be that this organizational structure would be better suited to a history of Crayola crayons than a simple list. So that's something else I'd like to put forward for comment. Would it make sense to leave the basic structure of the current page alone, but correct the color values and perhaps reconsider the separation of colors currently being produced and older colors, while placing the chronological tables in a separate article? Or would it be better to have just one article on the "regular" colors, and perhaps change the article title from "List" to "History"? I'd like to discuss all of these things with some of the page watchers before I start implementing any of these proposals. P Aculeius (talk) 02:25, 14 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Revisions underway[edit]

Having not received much feedback on the two previous topics, and not finding a better place for the new tables, I decided to try and incorporate them into this article. I've dramatically shortened the lead, since much of the information it contained was better placed under individual sections. I've added sortable tables for the 1903 colors, Munsell colors, and the original 48 and 64-count boxes.

This weekend I hope to add a table showing all of the colors added since 1990, as checked against Crayola's digital swatches (the color values given in the existing tables don't match the swatches, and a great many of them seem to have been made up out of thin air by National Names 2000 and/or the anonymous IP editor; there's no way to tell if they came from an earlier version of the Crayola site, or from physical swatches of the crayons, but a large number of them are very wrong).

Once this is done, I'll be removing the older two tables, which will be redundant except to the extent that the notes section contains hundreds of alternate names used for only one or two specialty packages. Given the amount of work that went into them, I suppose these should be kept somewhere, perhaps under their own article as a list of alternate names for Crayola colors.

I don't feel that I know enough about the specialty crayons to do much with the sections of the article about them, other than perhaps some copy editing or formatting work with the tables. I'm still thinking they might be better off as one or more separate articles. But I probably should make a table depicting the fluorescent colors, since I haven't been including them with the regular crayons, and they have their own separate issues with respect to names and changes in the lineup. They still aren't found in any assortments smaller than the 96-count. P Aculeius (talk) 02:20, 16 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 14 September 2015[edit]

The following protection template should be added at the top of this page:

{{pp-sock|expiry=September 20, 2015|small=yes}}

201.53.53.216 (talk) 00:54, 14 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Done Inomyabcs (talk) 01:03, 14 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Snowy Powder[edit]

Do we have proof that Crayola actually released Snowy Powder as an extra color in the Silver Swirls set? 2602:306:30AC:C1E0:3DFB:4B4C:C9A4:7E89 (talk) 01:26, 31 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The color, with hexadecimal code "C45768" was added on October 16, 2014 by 125.212.121.129, who also vandalized the article by replacing three color names with bogus colors. The hexadecimal code "C45678" (transposing the 7 and 6) was added by 2601:c:9b00:1449:a102:aee2:3541:519e on February 9, 2015. This editor's only contributions to Wikipedia were to this article, subsections "Silver Swirls" and "Markers" on that date. The color is not mentioned at CrayonCollecting.com's index of Crayola colors, nor in the section on Silver Swirls, and is not pictured with the Silver Swirls crayons. The statement "~ was an extra color" makes no sense, and sounds like one of Caidin-Johnson's hoaxes. Since there's no evidence that such a color existed, I'm deleting it now. P Aculeius (talk) 04:04, 31 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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Accessibility[edit]

Hey all, in this edit I flagged the article as having Accessibility issues. Briefly, we want to reach the largest readership possible, and many visually impaired readers will have difficulty reading content like this, where you have problematic contrast ratios between text and backgrounds.

Color H S V R G B Hexadecimal Notes
 Dandelion 46 63 100 254 216 93 #FED85D  
 Yellow 52 55 98 252 232 131 #FBE870  
 Green-Yellow 54 44 95 241 231 136 #F1E788  
 Middle Yellow 55 100 100 255 235 0 #FFEB00  

A good tool to help is this, and as you will notice, there are "NO"s all the way down in the results section. This means that there isn't sufficient context between the text and the background. The easiest fix would be to create unique columns for the text and the sample color as follows:

Name Color H S V R G B Hexadecimal Notes
 Dandelion 46 63 100 254 216 93 #FED85D  
 Yellow 52 55 98 252 232 131 #FBE870  
 Green-Yellow 54 44 95 241 231 136 #F1E788  
 Middle Yellow 55 100 100 255 235 0 #FFEB00  

While it will take some work to fix, I think this is a better solution that promotes Accessibility. Thoughts? Cyphoidbomb (talk) 18:26, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Will really have to play around with the column widths to see if this can work. I don't want to make the samples much narrower than they are now, but the table is already wider than I'd like. Ideally each colour should fit on one line, but because note sections can be rather busy, that gets difficult if your browser window isn't very wide. Note that a great many colours have very short names while others have very long names. A name column would have to be wider than the longest name, even if most of the names are much shorter, leaving a lot of empty space. I don't suppose there's any way to add alternate text, or something that would appear when one hovers the mouse over it? P Aculeius (talk) 18:54, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I have an idea, if we can get a little help. What if we used outlined bold text? With CSS shadows? Are average users allowed to do this? I created a mockup code that should work nicely on everything newer than IE9.

<style>

 td.colorful{ 
   #testing
   background-image: url("http://www.ahdwallpaperstab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Colorful-Wallpapers-Full-HD.jpg");
   background-size:300px;
   text-shadow:
    2px 2px #FFFFFF, 
    2px 0px #FFFFFF, 
    2px -2px #FFFFFF, 
    0px -2px #FFFFFF, 
    0px 2px #FFFFFF, 
    -2px 2px #FFFFFF, 
    -2px 0px #FFFFFF, 
    -2px -2px #FFFFFF;

} </style> VectorLightning (talk) 04:55, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure. I can't see what your suggestion looks like, but according to the site linked above in Cyphoidbomb's post, white text may not work with any but the very darkest colours (even the dark reds don't seem compliant enough), while a great many colours don't work with black text either (not just the dark ones). Plus, as I said, black text has an unfortunate side-effect of making the background colour look different, IMO, which white text does not. I've been considering shortening the notes section into a production years one, and converting all of the other contents into footnotes; this would allow for the format that Cyphoidbomb proposes for names, without significantly reducing the swatch size. I still consider that critical to tables like this. The former version of this table was, in addition to being highly inaccurate and a total jumble of colours organized in alphabetical order for no justifiable reason, rather ugly and had far too little colour for an illustration that's supposed to be all about colour. If I have time in the next few days, I may produce an example of what I'm thinking and post it here. But if you could show what your idea would look like, we'll have that to think about as well. P Aculeius (talk) 14:08, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Another option might be the one we see in the Original Air Date column here. Although I'm not sure if the white background is automatically generated based on the color of the background or what. I don't think it looks as clean as the alt I proposed above, but it might be a solution if you guys wanted to have the text in the middle of the colors. I have no preference for column widths or anything like that. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 15:30, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure how that column illustrates a good alternative. The only dark colored part of the table is the header, which has bold white text on a black background, which would comply with all measures of accessibility. The tool you linked above demonstrates that neither black nor white text would be compliant with all accessibility standards on most coloured backgrounds, and some colours wouldn't be compliant with either black or white text. Besides which, it would definitely not look good to switch text colours back and forth based on contrast levels. The various tables did so from the page's creation in 2005 until I set white as the standard last year, and it looked a mess. Right now your first suggestion above looks like the best, but I haven't had time to make a test table. Will also review accessibility guidelines to see if any other possibilities suggest themselves. The page lasted more than ten years with text on coloured backgrounds, so I'm sure it can wait a few more days while we figure this out. P Aculeius (talk) 17:30, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
P Aculeius - Sorry, I didn't explain myself well. I was referring to the reference in the Original air date column, which is labeled [A] and is surrounded by a white background, which makes the reference link more obvious than if it were simply blue on black. Editor Grapesoda22 was kind enough to provide an option in these edits. I'm not sure that the overall change is as aesthetically pleasing as a unique column for color name and sample, but I think it addresses the accessibility issue for the time being. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 03:12, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
By the gods, that's hideous! Why would someone go ahead and waste so much time on a truly pointless set of changes without even bothering to run it past the editors trying to come up with a better solution? Surely after ten years of one format, we could have waited a little while longer for discussion and experimentation. Reverting now. P Aculeius (talk) 05:51, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Cyphoidbomb Since one editor isn't willing to wait until this matter has been explored more thoroughly, I thought I'd better see what I could come up with using your original suggestion. Here are two versions, one with the name before, one after the swatch. The name column needed to be at least 15% of the table width to accommodate the longest name, "Permanent Geranium Lake", although this still might need to be tweaked for smaller windows. Oh, and sorry I misspelled your name in an earlier post. P Aculeius (talk) 13:58, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Version 1

Name Color H S V R G B Hexadecimal Production Years Notes
 Maize 44 70 95 242 198 73 #F2C649 1903–1990 "Gold Ochre" until 1958.
 Orange-Yellow 45 58 97 248 213 104 #F8D568 1958–1990  
 Yellow 52 55 98 252 232 131 #FBE870 1903–present  
 Green-Yellow 54 44 95 241 231 136 #F1E788 1958–present  
 Spring Green 59 20 93 236 235 189 #ECEBBD 1958–present  

Version 2

Color Name H S V R G B Hexadecimal Production Years Notes
 Maize 44 70 95 242 198 73 #F2C649 1903–1990 "Gold Ochre" until 1958.
 Orange-Yellow 45 58 97 248 213 104 #F8D568 1958–1990  
 Yellow 52 55 98 252 232 131 #FBE870 1903–present  
 Green-Yellow 54 44 95 241 231 136 #F1E788 1958–present  
 Spring Green 59 20 93 236 235 189 #ECEBBD 1958–present  

I could probably reduce the swatch width to 20% and divide the savings between "name" and "notes". Without text, the swatch may not need to be quite as wide, although I think it should be wider than in the example from January 24. Not sure whether the second presentation is potentially confusing, with the name following the swatch, but I think it's more attractive. P Aculeius (talk) 14:06, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Version 3

Color Name H S V R G B Hexadecimal Production Years Notes
 Maize 44 70 95 242 198 73 #F2C649 1903–1990 "Gold Ochre" until 1958.
 Orange-Yellow 45 58 97 248 213 104 #F8D568 1958–1990  
 Yellow 52 55 98 252 232 131 #FBE870 1903–present  
 Green-Yellow 54 44 95 241 231 136 #F1E788 1958–present  
 Spring Green 59 20 93 236 235 189 #ECEBBD 1958–present  

Don't get mad at me. I honestly didn't even realize there was an in-depth discussion going on, I really didn't. It first came to my attention when Cyphoidbomb mentioned it. I saw the color accessibility issues with this page and I thought adding < code > to the color names would be a good quick fix. Grapesoda22 (talk) 16:35, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Grapesoda22 Alright, I'm not mad. Sorry for coming across that way. I know you were trying to help. What's your opinion of the three examples above? Currently I'm inclined toward the third one, but I'd like to know if you think putting the name second would be confusing or create new accessibility isssues. P Aculeius (talk) 16:51, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Variation 3 seems like the best option. Maybe we could shorten the width of the color box a little, but other then that I'd say its the best option. Grapesoda22 (talk) 17:05, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'd rather not make the colour box any narrower. After all, this is all about colour, so there's a lot to be said for quantity! Without the text, 25% did seem unnecessarily wide, especially as two new columns were added. But it's 20% in version 3, and you can see what 15% looks like in the suggestion posted by Cyphoidbomb above. The name column is 17%, to account for very long names like "Permanent Geranium Lake" on narrower browser windows, and I don't think the colour column should be any narrower than that. I agree that it could be squeezed if absolutely necessary, but I would rather avoid it. P Aculeius (talk) 01:23, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to hear from someone who has color accessibility issues. I'm thinking that if a person cannot read the background text in the current article, they may not be able to distinguish the subtle differences in color which is the point of this article and therefore may not be disadvantaged by the current article. In other words, I prefer the current format to options 1,2 and 3, until I hear that the current article is something a reader with color accessibility issues would be interested in if it weren't for the background problem.--S Philbrick(Talk) 01:33, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I do want to make sure that the article is accessible to persons with visual impairments. Just because someone can't see all of the colors equally well doesn't mean that other parts of the table are useless, or even that being able to identify which colours one has trouble distinguishing isn't important. That said, I'm glad that somebody likes the format I designed, since I spent a lot of time developing and testing it before I replaced the previous table last year. Past versions used a mixture of black and white text, but I decided that the table would look better if it used one or the other consistently, and chose white because it seemed to have less effect on my perception of the background colours.
Nonetheless, I think it's important to provide some alternative means of identifying the colours for those who can't read the text easily. As Cyphoidbomb correctly pointed out, this is more of a problem with the yellows than any other colours, but there are also a few very pale colours in other parts of the spectrum: Sea Green, Middle Blue Green, Aquamarine, Periwinkle, Pig Pink, Almond, and Timberwolf being the hardest to read, in my opinion. Colourblindness doesn't seem to be relevant; using a utility called "Color Oracle" I simulated protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia, but contrast wasn't affected when some of the colours were removed; the text was as readable as before even on the palest colours. So the type of vision deficits that we're concerned with are those that make it hard to distinguish things with low contrast, rather than colourblindness.
I really don't know what proportion of the populace would have significantly greater difficulty reading the text than persons with normal vision; nor can I intuit what constitutes significant difficulty. Rather than assuming that it won't be a problem for more than a tiny percentage of users, I'd like to implement some kind of solution. But first, I'd like to know two things: what would someone relying on a text reader hear, when trying to find out what the colours in the table are? And is there any way to supply alternate text for the visually impaired, without affecting the normal appearance of the table, or an alternate version of the table designed for the visually impaired? If no such alternatives are practical, then I think we ought to implement something along the lines of version 3 above. P Aculeius (talk) 04:38, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Grapesoda22 did the same thing to Web colors by using <code> tags to add horrifically ugly white boxes with black background. I commend them for increasing accessibility, especially on the Crayola page. Without their changes, the pages wouldn't be getting better, but using a two ton hammer isn't always the best solution. For example, they changed 216 cells when only 30 of them had problems and changing the text to black solves most of them. I use WebAIM's Wave tool. It analyses the page for accessibility issues. The "contrast" button at the top-left gives errors on color contrast issues.
Some notes on the three tables you a proposing.
  1. The actual color is the main column in the table, so this should go first.
  2. #3 table is better for users of mobile devices. Smaller width, the better.
  3. Don't use HTML5 and HTML4 css together, just use HTML5.... Not | align="center" style="background:#E9E9E9", but | style="text-align:center; background:#E9E9E9;"
  4. You can make the article size smaller by adding style="text-align:center; at the top of the table and style="text-align:left;" to the cells that needed.
  5. Screen reader accessibility issues are not a problem in your tables. You've done everything right. No alt text is needed.
  6. If you want to hear what a screen reader would say... If you are using Chrome, install ChromeVox. It is by Google. If using Firefox, then use Fire Vox.
Bgwhite (talk) 09:38, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Alright, I've created a possible replacement table following Cyphoidbomb's first suggestion and the comments above. It should completely resolve concerns about the table being inaccessible to visually-handicapped users, but I'm not personally convinced that it's a very good. I think it loses something in presentation by separating the names and colours. However, unless it's feasible to create a subpage of this article specifically for alternate versions, I don't know what else to do. What does everyone else think? P Aculeius (talk) 15:16, 8 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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Blue Ribbon[edit]

The page is still not complete because the color Blue Ribbon, which is the 100,000,000,000th crayon, is absent.`73.1.57.180 (talk) 14:53, 2 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

We can not see the actual color because no one actually used it.--Make WP Great Again (talk) 14:56, 14 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Not quite. Got you covered quite a while ago. Swatched it, wanna figure out what color it actually is? https://www.flickr.com/photos/25547076@N06/4070384901 --Nintenfreak (talk) 08:48, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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Color Slicks[edit]

Someone removed the Color Slicks crayons from the list due to original research. I'll upload a reliable source for it before the color slicks colors get put back. Ssjhowarthisawesome (talk) 18:37, 15 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Absolute Zero reference[edit]

As part of an initiative to prune entries in List of colors: A–F, List of colors: G–M, and List of colors: N–Z, the first entry I reviewed, "Absolute Zero" is linked to this page. While this page has an entry, the associated reference appears to be a dead link. My hope is someone can do some research to find a better link.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:02, 21 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wish I could be more help. My expertise mainly concerns the standard crayons, and the fluorescents, for which could depend on a scholarly website, Crayola's color pages, and actual swatches. Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of these cover the twistables! In the worst-case scenario, I suppose you could buy a pack, make some swatches on plain white paper, and attempt to eyeball the right RGB/HSV and see if the result matches the existing values. I wouldn't call that original research, inasmuch as you're using those values to describe the actual color of the crayon when used to color things, a bit like describing the plot of a book or the style of a piece of music. As long as you're simply describing what anyone else could see by doing the same thing, without adding any kind of original theories, it should be okay. That's about the only way I can think of to support the color if you can't find an official or scholarly source on it (which isn't that likely). Just remember, even poorly sourced or unsourced information doesn't have to be deleted unless it's likely to be challenged. So unless there's some reason to believe that this color doesn't actually represent the color of the crayon, it's probably okay to leave it until someone can find a good source. P Aculeius (talk) 05:15, 22 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not fully on the same page. Wikipedia is enormously successful, arguably more successful than it deserves, meaning that we've done a good enough job that some people rely on it without reasonable challenges (i.e. checking to see if a piece of information is actually sourced.) One reason I think it's time to take a somewhat stronger position is that I suspect that some people have invented colors that don't really exist and have managed to slip them by us for years. Actually, I shouldn't say "suspect", because I removed many from the list which are clearly invented. That's easy to do when the name is obviously made up and isn't internally linked, but I now fear that some "contributors" are little more subtle and making sure to add a link to some of the page even if that link doesn't fully support the color. I started walking through the list of colors and over 90% are inadequately sourced, many with weaker sourcing than this one. I'll bet there are some people smirking because they've invented a color, added it to a list and smirking because we aren't doing our job.--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:04, 29 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I used to try to deal with such articles for a while but gave up on it. I'm pretty sure several fake entries still exists as I've seen them show up over the years linking to the shades of color templates that I have on my watch list. A lot of the fake colors survived for quite a while, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zinnwaldite (color) for an example of one. PaleAqua (talk) 00:33, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I know people do add fake stuff all the time. For the standard colors and the fluorescents, I know they're not fake, because I've gone through the sources myself. Every color is documented by reliable sources. If anything new appears, it's either bogus or verifiable. Usually easy to spot the made-up ones, because they don't even sound plausible, and they're given details that are obviously made up (any new colors would need to have new dates, not very old ones, for instance, and old colors didn't have silly names). I can't say the same for all of the specialty crayons, but I have glanced at them from time to time to see if they appeared to be verifiable as colors, even though I'm less confident about how they're depicted. But I don't think I've ever dealt with the extreme twistables, unless just to check color names. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure you can find documentation sufficient at least to prove that the colors exist, although to verify the colors, you might need to obtain a set and check them yourself! P Aculeius (talk) 01:06, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Just to be clear - I'm presently only interested in Absolute Zero which does not have a supporting reference. I don't plan to search for documentation. If someone tracks down documentation for Absolute Zero I won't remove the color from the list of colors but if there isn't documentation I plan to remove it from the list of colors.--S Philbrick(Talk) 01:48, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Just to be clear, that's thoroughly unhelpful. You would have deleted something that could have been documented in five minutes by checking reputable sources. I found it first try, and also found what the correct hex codes should be for all eight, because according to the source, all of them are based on other extant colors—all but one of them fluorescent. Reworked the table, and it's done. P Aculeius (talk) 03:01, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Just to be completely clear, policy is that "Any material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, must include an inline citation that directly supports the material. Any material that needs a source but does not have one may be removed" (emphasis mine). I don't see anything "unhelpful" or contrary to policy in S Philbrick's comment. --DanielRigal (talk) 19:44, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
information Administrator note As an outside observer who is familiar with the excessive disruption that has gone on at this article, shifting the burden to an established editor to disprove questionable content is just not reasonable here, even if it only takes 5 minutes. There has been so much garbage submitted at this article, in many cases by one disruptive child with a legacy of pollution, it's just not fair to make everybody else do the homework. May I please request that we keep that in mind the next time around? We should assume good faith until the good faith becomes vandalism, at which point we should all become watchdogs. This would be one of those articles. Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 04:24, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The reason I considered it unhelpful is that a great deal of time and energy was used to argue over the deletion of citable and formerly cited information, following the loss of the source material when the link went dead. Wikipedia policy says (and maybe someone can remind me where, as I looked but couldn't locate it last night) that before deleting unsourced or inadequately sourced information, editors should consider checking to see if sources exist. "Citation needed" and related tags could have been used to flag the statement for this, and there's no time deadline for supplying the information if it's not obvious nonsense or a case of BLP. That wasn't even tried here once the original source was found to have vanished. It was just, "you find a source for this or I'm deleting it". It took longer to type that up than to find a reliable source that isn't likely to go anywhere soon. It makes no sense to make a huge fuss about something being unreferenced, but be unwilling to do a quick Google search or check known references for the information. But it does create work for other editors! What would have been helpful is if the editor in question considered doing that, instead of stating his or her unwillingness to do anything of the sort. P Aculeius (talk) 13:05, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@P Aculeius: Thanks for engaging in the conversation. As a bit of background, I've had List of colors: A–F on my watchlist for seven years. I haven't been particularly active. A typical edit is in response to a new color being added to the list prompting an entry in my watchlist. In many cases, it was a made-up color, either with no link at all or a link to an article which didn't discuss the color. I reverted those but haven't had more substantial involvement until recently. Naïvely, I thought most of the Roughly 1600 colors in the list would be valid with a link to an article discussing the color, containing reliable references for the name of the color as well as the color coordinates.

My initial plan was to check each color because I thought it would take only a few seconds to confirm the legitimate ones. Which is true, but while I thought nine out of 10 might be fine it's more like nine out of 10 have problems. It took far more than five minutes to do an investigation in cases with a link article seem to discuss the color because it occurred to me that perhaps it had but had been removed so I did a history search. I carried out this process for the first 31 colors, but I quickly concluded I needed a different process. I was probably averaging 10 minutes so on each color. If I devoted an hour a day to this task it would take me over a year assuming I didn't burn out earlier. (And that time estimate does not include tracking down better references for the linked articles.) I checked the history statistics and see that over 2500 editors have contributed to the list article. My hope and expectation was that some small portion of them would offer to help, either with doing the first step in the research or following up on some of the points I raised. To my immense surprise, more than a week after my initial post to the talk page, only two editors have chimed in. Both were supportive, although one emphasize the need to look into sites referenced as they felt that may be some problems.

I'm sympathetic to your point that it may have only taking you five minutes to track down a better reference. However, five minutes per color translates into a half year commitment for me and that's just not in the cards. I think it makes more sense to hope that editors of the linked articles will be interested in making sure those articles are properly referenced. Do you disagree?--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:50, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I understand your dilemma, but I think we're approaching the matter from opposite viewpoints. I know a lot of rubbish gets added to articles like this, but the page is regularly patrolled, and anything that sounds doubtful tends to be checked. In a case like this, where there was a source, but the source has vanished, the most sensible approach is not to delete the information without first checking to see whether another source can be located to verify the claim. A vast amount of accurate information on Wikipedia isn't currently cited to reliable sources, but easily could be, and in most cases, it probably shouldn't be deleted unless attempts to determine whether it's verifiable have been made. P Aculeius (talk) 22:41, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps you misunderstood me. I'm not talking about deleting unsourced material from List of Crayola crayon colors, I'm talking about deleting an entry from List of colors: A–F if it isn't sourced. I'll also note that while you tracked down a source supporting the existence of Absolute Zero as a real color, I didn't see anything in the reference that supported the color coordinates. I'm still mulling over what to do (at List of colors, not here) in situations where a reliable source supports the existence of the name as a real color but there is no source to support the color coordinates. I see (footnote 3) that many the coordinates on this page were determined using which surely must be characterized as original research.--S Philbrick(Talk) 00:41, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I may well have misunderstood you if you weren't proposing deleting it from this article. Frankly, I think many of the names invented by Crayola since 1990 are absurd, and this is an example. Outside of the world of Crayola, this color doesn't have a name. But I don't know the criteria you generally use for the pages you work on, and whether having a crayon with a particular name should be good enough to say that's the name of a "color" rather than a specific crayon. As for the method for obtaining it, however, I have to disagree. WP policy clearly indicates that works of literature, art, architecture, etc. are valid sources for their own contents, provided that they're described objectively, and that anyone who examines them can verify the statement. If you can measure something with a yardstick, or a scale, or a digital color meter, and anyone can use the same process to obtain the same results, then it's verifiable, not original research. If you have a sample of a color, and can reproduce it to a high degree of accuracy using RGB, and indicate clearly the limits of accuracy, it's not original research, because anyone can look at a sample of the same color, and verify whether the color matches. P Aculeius (talk) 02:09, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Just a note that RGB mappings are not a perfect match to the full gamut. Its possible to get several different coordinates from a single crayon drawing just from how light or hard the crayon was pressed, the type, color and properties of paper or canvas, the properties of the background lighting, how the image was scanned into a computer, etc. The is also the color space of the display to consider, are we talking sRGB? The best we can say is that some coordinate will look like a color that could be produced by a crayon of a certain color. But it wouldn't be the only coordinate possible. It's very possible, actually almost certain if you have that two people drawing with the same crayon and scanning it into a computer with different equipment will get different values. This isn't the same thing as measuring something with a yardstick. PaleAqua (talk) 06:40, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed that there's some variability inherent in swatches taken from actual crayons, although that's not the case with Crayola's digital swatches, which are solid colors with every pixel identical. That's why those are the preferred sources for all the colors for which they're available. However, when they're not available, which is the case for many older colors, it's still possible to approximate the RGB values (and yes, they should be sRGB, since that's the default display method) within a reasonable degree of accuracy, and as long as it's clearly stated that it can't be pinned down more precisely and why, it should still be acceptable. It's not as different from using a ruler as you think; for instance, unless you're using a micrometer, you generally round up or down to the nearest significant unit, so what one person reports as "about 25 centimeters" someone else might claim is "exactly 25.27 centimeters", not taking into account that the natural variability of the object itself might mean that most examples vary between 25.2 and 25.4 centimeters. The natural variability of crayon wax on paper is clearly stated in the text preceding the tables, and in an accompanying footnote, and has been since the current tables were implemented two or three years ago. But as I said, if someone thinks there's a mistake, they can easily check the source for themselves, and see if it's a fair representation. P Aculeius (talk) 12:50, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Almond[edit]

This entry was added to List of colors: A–F by an IP in 2010 with this edit. However the hex code added was #EFDECD. At the time it was added the color was linked but to the article about the nut not the color.

The current link goes to List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors#Standard_colors. That page had almond added with this edit. However, that entry has hex code #EED9C4.

The reference in the linked page doesn't appear to be helpful In terms of identifying the attributes. It would be nice if someone provided a better reference. However, this site supports the hex code in the linked article, but not the code in the original list. I'd like a second opinion but I think it makes sense to replace the hex code and the other attributes in the list with the information at the linked page.--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:12, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Presumably "almond" as a color is somewhat variable within the range of light brown/tan/khaki. The values given in the Crayola article are based on Crayola's digital swatch for its own version of "almond", which won't be identical with every other version of "almond". So if you're trying to describe the value of the Crayola crayon called "almond", it's EED9C4 according to Crayola's own digital swatch. But as a general name for a light brown color, it could refer to any number of similar colors that differ by small amounts. The other web site you linked doesn't say where its almond came from, but it's clearly almond colored, and in general, that's as good as anyone else's almond. P Aculeius (talk) 22:19, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@P Aculeius: I've been given this a little bit more thought and have come up with something(inspired by your comment) which may help define a problem, although if I'm right, I don't see an immediate solution.

I'll define two terms:

  1. Specific — a color whose attributes can be defined by an exact set of numbers
  2. Range — a color whose attributes ought to be defined by ranges of numbers

Some of the Pantone colors are good examples of specific colors—a color invented by the company has a very specific set of attributes.

Many colors that are motivated by physical objects in the universe would best be represented by a range of colors. As you note, it could be used for a number of similar colors that differ by small amounts.

In addition, there are some color names that are a hybrid. For example, "red" is a very specific set of attributes when used in certain contexts, but in general usage, there are a wide range of hues that someone might describe as red.

The problem, of course, is that we have a good way of describing specific colors. While there are some issues related to gamut issues, and other issues, for example in the case of metallic and florescent hues, a computer monitor may not be able to properly render the actual color. However, that limitation aside, there are usually ways to identify a unique set of attributes for most specific colors. However, what do we do for colors best characterized by a range of attributes? In theory, we might identify a hex triplet, and associate a range of numbers rather than a single value for each of the entries. Perhaps that is done by some experts in the field but I haven't seen it.

This is a problem because when we want to describe a color, especially in the context of a Wikipedia article, we very much want to show what the color looks like, and I can typically be done for a unique set of attributes.

In some cases, such as Shades of brown, we illustrate a range with a 3 x 3 matrix, with the center image identifying the main color and the outer eight images illustrating the range of possible colors that are shades of that color. That approach is useful in a general article about the color, but when it comes to creating list of color articles, we currently have to include a single entry. Perhaps we need to rethink that approach but absent a major restructuring, we have to pick a specific value which can be difficult in the case of colors for which there truly is a range of colors associated with that name.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:15, 5 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I think you'll find if you look up a lot of colors in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, you'll see that a large proportion of them are described as "variable", and that even those that aren't so described are never given such a precise definition that they couldn't vary within a small range of attributes. Apart from colors that are given specific definitions for limited purposes, such as by Pantone, Crayola, or some paint or design company, for their own products, all colors are somewhat variable. Pretty much the only ones that are always (or almost always) invariable will be commercial names that are never used outside of a commercial context; i.e. those that are proprietary, and not so descriptive that other people use them generically. Even if a color is defined by something with almost no range, like a specific chemical composition that seems to produce the exact same hue, saturation, and value every time, if the name becomes widely known, it'll be applied to anything very similar to that color. I would say that the "solution" is to describe pretty much all colors as variable, except when defined by a commercial entity or legal standard to represent an exact set of values (not approximately), and no other. P Aculeius (talk) 13:12, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
crayola green
Completely agree, most color terms are "variable". And even the ones that are fixed are typically only fixed for a single standard. Further the same color term might be different between different standards. Consider the color term "green". In general it covers quite a range in the visible spectrum ~495 to 570 nm and a large area in the L*A*B color space. In X11 color names it is #00FF00 in an unspecified RGB space. In HTML/CSS it is #008000 in sRGB. As a Crayola crayon it is a different color see image. We also have to consider that even when a standard exactly defines a color term it might not be in RGB. Consider the definitions of amber as defined by the 1968 convention on road traffic, it is defined a tight range in the XYZ color space and is outside the sRGB color space. International Klein Blue is a very specific deep blue paint but isn't defined by any color coordinates but instead by how the paint is made. PaleAqua (talk) 15:00, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
BTW in regards to this article, I think pictures of the drawings using the color are probably way better representations then giving a coordinate. This is especially true for colors that are simple single colors but mixtures (such as color mixups) or have reflective properties such as the silver swirls or the glitter ones. PaleAqua (talk) 15:06, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That would be difficult to achieve without having copyright to photos of swatches from most older colors. Although I've attempted scanning photos of swatches I made myself from colors produced during the 1980's, the scans didn't accurately depict some of the colors, probably due to variable reflectivity of the wax or other odd photographic issues. Mr. Welter's swatches are the only ones I know of for the oldest colors (any that went out of production before the second year of the 64-color box), and he'll own the copyright. I think the current layout is the most consistent and visually appealing we can hope for. It just has to make clear that they're meant to represent and approximate the colors, not provide the exact appearance of wax on paper. Perhaps it can be made clearer that the RGB/HSV/Hex codes represent the color depicted in the accompanying swatch, not the exact color you'll get from the crayon. The reason is complicated: there's just no way to get an absolute definitive and precise representation of wax on paper, because you can color with different hardness, leaving more or fewer gaps, with paper that shows through to differing degrees, and even the best photos may not be perfectly accurate in the representation of color, to say nothing of the natural variability of the wax itself (i.e. some crayons may be very slightly lighter, darker, more intense, etc.).
For a good demonstration, look on Google Books and Internet Archive for copies of Ridgway's Color Standards and Color Nomenclature. There are at least six free and fully-digitized copies available on-line, and all of them vary in brightness and intensity of the color plates; some colors photograph somewhat consistently, while others are almost always too pale, too dark, too grey, or too aged to be accurate representations of the original swatches. I have a physical copy—a reprint consisting of photos of the original book, of course—and even it's far from perfect with some plates, which you can tell don't look they way they were supposed to. Looking at this, you may see why I think the best option with articles like this one is to provide the best and most consistent depiction of the color that we can make with the tools available, and clearly state why it's not "definitive" or "official" (except in the cases where the color codes come directly from Crayola's web site); they're just an attempt to illustrate the approximate color. P Aculeius (talk) 15:38, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Possible removal from list[edit]

An entry in List of colors: A–F contained a link to this page.

The entry is :

  • Coconut

I don't see any evidence that this term is discussed in this article as a color, rather than just as a scent and plan to delete it from the list per this discussion: Talk:List_of_colors#New_approach_to_review_of_entries

If someone decides that this color should have a section in this article and it is added, I would appreciate a ping.--S Philbrick(Talk) 20:13, 13 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of HSV and RGB values and table formats[edit]

The recent RFC on Talk:History of Crayola crayons has led to the removal of the HSV and RGB values. I am going to implement the same result here. The RFC also removed some but not all of the hex values. Only the referenced ones were kept. I will remove the values which are "estimated" and leave the rest.

The other tables, with the grids of colours, are not referenced. I think these tables are ugly and uninformative but the RFC gives us no clues as how best to handle those as they had no equivalent in the other article. I'd like to see them reformatted and referenced, if we are going to keep them at all. I'll wait and see what people think before altering those. --DanielRigal (talk) 23:20, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Table layout[edit]

I'm rearranging the tables here and at History of Crayola crayons so that the names and colors are in separate columns. The goal is to improve readability, since text on a colored background can be difficult to read. –dlthewave 03:45, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like a nice improvement. Wonder if the production years should also be split into a separate column for sorting. PaleAqua (talk) 04:52, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I also agree that this is an improvement. If we all like this arrangement then, once we have got it optimised, it would be good to convert the other tables further down into a similar format for consistency. --DanielRigal (talk) 10:37, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I added a production year column, wouldn't mind an extra set of eyes to make sure I did everything correctly. PaleAqua (talk) 21:25, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I can't see any problems so far. BTW, when dealing with columns I have found that the Visual Editor can be very helpful. I don't like or use it for general editing but it definitely helps with table columns. --DanielRigal (talk) 21:44, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yep that's what I used, then did some tweaks of the column style options with the wikitext editor as a second pass. But still was a lot of cutting, trimming and pasting. PaleAqua (talk) 23:22, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Pearl/Neon/Glitter 2019[edit]

Crayola just dropped three new specialty crayon sets, the first new standard crayons since Metallic FX if I'm not mistaken. I did some swatches linked here: https://imgur.com/a/nMpXWL2 Some important things to note, I don't have the glitter crayons yet, since I didn't notice them originally, and will rectify that as soon as possible. From their website it does appear that this is a different set of glitter crayons than the previous 16 count, as there is only one white, but we'll see. The Neon set contains three versions of 8 colors each: shocking pink, wild watermelon, atomic tangerine, sunglow, screamin' green, sky blue, and purple pizzazz. There are glitter and pearlescent versions of each color included, and those were swatched in the link as well. It's probable, and eyeballing it, it seems to be the case, that the glitter versions are just the regular colors with glitter in it. All glitter seems to be silver or colorless. Additionally I'm unsure if the pearl versions of these colors are different in hue.--Nintenfreak (talk) 05:25, 19 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As an addendum, there appear to be a new set of Metallic crayons in a 24 count too. They weren't listed publicly on the site until recently, but I just ordered them and I'll get a swatch of them. I also ordered the Glitter crayons and we'll see if there's any overlap with the 1997+ glitter crayons. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nintenfreak (talkcontribs) 04:47, 25 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Just a bit of a note before I do the swatches, the new Metallic crayons are, indeed, the original metallic crayons plus another 9 new ones. Metallic Sunburst was discontinued, at least as a color name. I checked that swatch first and it appears to be a dead on match for a new color, robot canary. It was probably renamed because of metallic seaweed, not that they haven't had 16 years to fix it or anything. The new sets do have multilingual names on their wrappers and they're at the end like normal, so if they get used up a lot you can still tell. The glitter crayons are definitely different, at least, some of them are. I'll have to make some guesses as to what they are, because unlike the original set, they have unique color names. For instance "black with glitzy gold glitter" is just "black gold" and "orange with twinkling turquoise glitter" is "campfire flicker" (probably, still have to do swatches since the obviously sky blue color seems to have red glitter instead of gold). The biggest difference is that only one white crayon survived this transition, diamond dazzle. The line has once before changed "purple with ruby red glitter" to "royal purple with ruby red glitter" so these kinds of changes aren't expected.--Nintenfreak (talk) 20:41, 4 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the detailed update. Color samples "estimated using a swatch" are considered original research and not usable in the article (per RFC), but this information might be useful for finding reliable samples from the Crayola website or other reliable sources. –dlthewave 20:41, 5 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Pale Rose[edit]

Couldn't find the Crayola colour "Pale Rose". I know it exists because I'm holding it in my hand. Could someone please add it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mcguy15 (talkcontribs) 19:44, 17 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We can't exactly do that, but if you could take pictures of it and, if you have already used it, make a swatch, that might be something that crayon collectors would be interested in knowing. The truth is, our information about a lot of early Crayola history has been put together by collectors.--Nintenfreak (talk) 02:53, 31 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]


Sorry, please ignore this. I've made a mistake! Mcguy15 (talk) 21:29, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Burnt Umber[edit]

I remember Burnt Umber from my childhood, so it must have been in existence around 1960, but the page here says it was discontinued in 1944. Is there a way to find out?

Daniel R. Grayson (talk) 01:50, 18 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Daniel! Good question, the Crayola company wasn't exactly keeping great records back then about their products. My mom was born in 1958 and she had a box of Crayons including Medium Violet, even though the current Box of 64 was first standardized in 1958. More than likely you had some new old stock as a child. --Nintenfreak (talk) 02:40, 31 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Problem[edit]

Ok so as you probably know this page has a lot of problems. I'm gonna list some problems I found that I don't think anyone else is talking about the problem is that the background for charcoal gray is showing the color sandstone. obviously I could be wrong on this but I just wanted to make sure because this page needs the biggest amount of help possible and this is something to help this page. (https://www.htmlcsscolor.com/hex/736A62 also here was the link for how I made the desertion of the thing of charcoal gray is wrong, #736A62 is the hex code for the thing and you can check this by "inspecting") I do acidly have another thing I want to talk about. just because that hex inset on the Crayola website doesn't mean we should only put the hex only on there web site we should do all the colors like charcoal gray or blue (|) and I know that will take a lot of time but Wikipedia has done bigger so we can do this and also where the heck is the hex on the Crayola website?!

  • These color swatches may overlap with the names of other colors, but the color names are what Crayola calls them. These are the hexcodes of the actual colors.--Nintenfreak (talk) 02:42, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Also, the Hex on the Crayola website might be archived because they've really changed to just a store rather than a product showcase website.

mistakes[edit]

Thememe420 (talk) 14:55, 20 May 2021 (UTC) anyways when I was studying what crayon I found out that forest green is wrong according to the same website and it said that the icon for forest green is wrong it said that background is called Oxley the real forest green hex code according to that website is #228B22 not #5FA777 and as always i may be wrong and also will give links https://www.htmlcsscolor.com/hex/5FA777 https://www.htmlcsscolor.com/hex/228B22 anyways I will continue studying it[reply]

  • --Nintenfreak (talk) 02:44, 5 August 2021 (UTC) The hexcodes correspond to the real crayon color, not some list outside this website.[reply]

Rare Crayola crayons[edit]

--Thememe420 (talk) 17:53, 21 May 2021 (UTC) anyways we all know about at least 1 rare Crayola color right? you know stuff like C-Rex, The Color Purple, Mirtilla Blueberry and many others so why are they not here? also is no-one on the talk page?[reply]

  • --Nintenfreak (talk) 02:40, 5 August 2021 (UTC) Almost always those special crayons are just regular colors with a new name, and this page doesn't list special names for existing colors.[reply]

Techno brite[edit]

Hi! I’ve never tried to help with a wikipedia page before so I’m not sure if this is the best way to do this, or what the organization system for this page is, but i noticed the Techno Brite crayons from 1997 aren’t in this list? They’re my favorite release from crayola, with fun silly colors like plug & play pink, green dot com, and www dot purple! Should someone add these? 76.27.86.200 (talk) 21:27, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Removing sections because you're a wikilord[edit]

Here's sources it's not made up. Stop acting like its formatting means it isn't real https://shop.crayola.com/color-and-draw/confetti-metallic-neon-and-cosmic-crayon-set-96-count-5234620000.html http://www.jennyscrayoncollection.com/2022/06/crayola-24-bold-bright-construction.html https://www.jennyscrayoncollection.com/2021/12/crayola-24-cosmic-crayons.html https://shop.crayola.com/color-and-draw/confetti-crayons-24-count-5234070000.html https://www.walmart.com/ip/CRAYOLA-SPECIAL-EFFECTS-CRAYONS-96-CT/1140967033?athbdg=L1700 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nintenfreak (talk • contribs) 01:01, 22 July 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nintenfreak (talkcontribs)

Re: some changes in the "Standard colors" list[edit]

In both this article and "History of Crayola crayons" someone has added some new information about how 20 new colors are being added to the 152 count box by this October. However, the reference linked does not direct to a working link on Crayola's website. I've been looking for a reputable source about this for a while now; does anyone know where this information comes from? TheMinester (talk) 19:20, 2 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Cosmic crayons[edit]

Hello! Have you ever heard about the new 24-set Cosmic Crayons? It was just released last year. So I'm just asking that we need to add this special crayons from the list. Thanks! LikeRealTimes I got you a message!📩 11:10, 22 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Bluetiful row bug[edit]

I changed the ordinary "yes" and "no"s into a template but the Bluetiful row is broken, I tried to put a asterisk * into the label but it bugs up the cell and causes them to appear as the partial source code of the template. How can I fix this, it must be a bug when a sort key is added? RainbowLover334148 (talk) 09:37, 4 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Edit: I restored the revision before my change and added the aforementioned broken version into my second sandbox. RainbowLover334148 (talk) 09:45, 4 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Edit: I finally found a way to fix, it was an additional pipe. RainbowLover334148 (talk) 04:35, 5 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Confetti Crayon[edit]

The description under Confetti Crayon reads like an advertisement. I'm going to rewrite it when I get autoconfirmed. Alternatively, someone could fix it for me before then. Dinsfire24 (talk) 03:40, 3 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Dinsfire24 (talk) 18:58, 24 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hexadecimal[edit]

Has Crayola actually published these hexadecimal values as canonical, or are they just numbers that some programmer stuck on the website to approximate the named colors? --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 14:57, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

They are original research sampled from website. Similar problems exists on many of the color term pages, and even many of the sourced ones are circular references that can be traced back to old versions of "List of Colors" and the like. PaleAqua (talk) 23:01, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Unified table formatting for accessibility[edit]

I came here from the depths of Wikipedia twitter account; this article is charming, and someone's clearly put a lot of work in to representing the colours of each crayon, but – as people in years previous have raised themselves – I'm concerned about the accessibility of some of the tables in the 'Speciality Crayons' section.

There's no unified table formatting for these colours. Sometimes the tables are colour first, name in white cell next to it, then details in cells next to that; sometimes it's a block of colour with the crayon name displayed on top in a differently-coloured font. The Crayons with Glitter table seems to attempt meaningful contrast, and it mostly succeeds, but the display of rainbow colours behind text is clunky; the table below that is worse – the colours 'aqua fizz', 'tropical shower', etc. are pretty unreadable.

Surely we could plump for a unified, colour-first legible-name-second table approach here?—Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 15:45, 27 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank You![edit]

This is like the most helpful page on the entirety of Wikipedia. I have used it for probably ten years. 47.12.225.19 (talk) 19:21, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Color Estimation[edit]

Would it be possible at all to sample several photos of the crayons under good lighting to estimate the colors for this page? (For example, sampled from branding materials, scans of boxes... scans of crayons...) CrustyCaverns (talk) 16:10, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Several notes[edit]

1: It would be great if we could fix the tables so that the names and colors are in different columns. A lot of this has been done since the last time I looked at this page, but there are still some where the text is on top of the color- often with low contrast. As of today, they are:

-Fabric Crayons

-Color Mix-Up Crayons

-2019 glitter crayons

-Neon Crayons

-True to Life Crayons

2: For some reason, the color names for the Metallic FX crayons are bold, while nothing else is.

3: This issue in particular is definitely up for further discussion, but I think it might be prudent to reorganize the Colors of the World Crayons. At present, they are organized alphabetically(ish), but if you look at them, you'll notice there are three hues- Almond, Golden, and Rose (this is only counting the skin tones, by the way)- and ten shades- Extra Light, Very Light, Light, Light Medium, Medium, Medium Deep, Deep, Very Deep, Extra Deep, and Deepest- although it seems that Medium Rose and Very Deep Golden have been swapped out for Extra Light Almond and Deepest Almond. I would propose listing the skin tones according to one of these characteristics.

4: I'm going to call attention back to 76.27.86.200 (talk) and LikeRealTimes I got you a message!📩 's comments on Techno Brite and Cosmic crayons. Were/are they unique colors, or old colors with special names? I also have seen a box of "Colors of Kindness", and the same questions could be applied to that as well.

5: I'm not sure why the list of Confetti Crayons was deleted. I get that the color "sprinkles" and maybe even the base colors probably don't have known hex codes, but we could still include the names. I will note here that, on the crayon wrappers, the names are written in all lowercase- you guys can decide whether or not that should be copied here.

That's it! Thanks!

-AAEexecutive (talk) 19:29, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]