XKCD recently ran an interesting web survey of its users about colors.  Simply presenting a color to the user and asking them to name it.  Sounds simple enough, but the results are amazing.  Of course, the sampleset is a bit suspect (geeks who are already Xkcd fans) and self-selected, but the results show not only interesting trends in color perception and human vision, but in the psychology.  Such as:

  • Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
  • Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.

You can still view the survey here, but definitely hit his website for some fascinating graphs.

via Color Survey Results « xkcd. via ChartPorn

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