A better option?

I had all these ideas, but somehow I just have no motivation to write this week. I have a thing, a gaming thing. It is almost done, but I don’t know how to get to the point where it’s done. I am so close. It just doesn’t want to be finished. So today, I’m going to whine about discuss the DMC numbering system for floss colors, and complain about all the better options explore ways that it could be easier to remember. 

First, the DMC numbering system is a means of organizing their vast array of colors. They have at least a thousand color codes, all of which define a very specific color and shade. These codes don’t have any relation to the colors they represent, and there’s no rhyme or reason to the codes. Some related colors are near each other, like 971 Pumpkin and 970 Pumpkin Light, or 796 and 797, both dark blues. But 815 is a dark red and 818 is light pink, and some shades (mostly ecru) don’t have a number even. It’s frustrating, hard to remember, and usually easy to mix up the ones you want. 

Factor in typos and misreading, and it’s easy to end up with a completely different color than the one you need. These colors may have internal reasons for the codes, but to the end consumer, it’s time consuming at best and frustrating at worst. 

What would be a better solution? Well, we’re looking for something that’s easy to remember and supports the hundreds of colors that DMC offers, plus the potential to add more. So it’s got to be something more than color names, because we’ll run out of good names eventually and what happens when they make a fourth shade of something that could fall under “royal blue” or “ecru”. 

So let’s think. Numbers are good, but they have to make more sense. What I would do is make the codes a set length — add 0s if necessary, but none of these where some of them are two- or three-digit and others have 4. 4 digits sounds good. The first digit from the left can be a basic hue — maybe 1-7 for the colors of the rainbow, then add pink and brown as 8 and 9, and 0 means a shade of white or black or gray (since there aren’t that many possible ways to do black). That gives about 999 shades of each color, which should be plenty. 

The second and third digit can be the general shade and value, respectively — this offers fewer options than HSV colors generally do, yes, but it would be relative and there’s not that much specificity with dyes anyways. And then the last digit could be an identifier, in case there are multiple colors that could fall into the same hue/shade/value distinction, and provide room to expand. 

Or maybe we could just switch to 6 digit hexadecimal colors and use a similar system to computer colors to talk about due colors, even though light and dyes work differently. That way you could tell someone your favorite floss colors and they could accurately represent it on a computer!