Randall Munroe (of XKCD) has been running a “name the colour” survey for the last few months and today released the data. The results are broken down by gender, and he makes some fascinating obvservations.

I’ve been working on a colour-related project on and off for about a year now, and part of that has involved creating visualisations of the RGB colour space – plotting red on the X axis, blue on Y, green on Z. So I thought it would be interesting to map XKCD’s 954 most common colour names in three dimensions – his charts are nice n’ all, but sexy javascript 3d is, well, sexier:

If you click that, you’ll be taken to the demo page, where you can interact with the cube. It’s a bit juddery, working entirely with divs and DOM manipulation, rather than canvas. Here’s a view from the side angle that shows off the “3d-ness” a bit more:

Of course, a canvas is really a better solution, so here’s a version that renders onto canvas, which is much much faster, but currently omits the names:

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