Alicornutopia

If we do secondaries I want #007BA7 (cerulean).

I have thought that it might be useful for people to be able to have moieties that are things other than just single colors. It'd be hard but not impossible to use them in the daily report (think tiny icons; I note that we're not using the board's smiley system for anything else), and probably easyish to use them on the Constellation site.

My *instinct* would be that since some people have been using their colors for a while or otherwise have gotten attached to them maybe when colors are close enough for confusion to set in the subsequent people who chose confusing colors should choose a secondary and the first person who had a color in that category should keep it. I think it would be deeply weird for Alicorn to have a moiety other than green or for Kappa to have one other than purple.

MaggieoftheOwls wrote:My *instinct* would be that since some people have been using their colors for a while or otherwise have gotten attached to them maybe when colors are close enough for confusion to set in the subsequent people who chose confusing colors should choose a secondary and the first person who had a color in that category should keep it. I think it would be deeply weird for Alicorn to have a moiety other than green or for Kappa to have one other than purple.

I agree. I could imagine ranking it by something else, probably total amount of glowfic written, but seniority is more consistent anyway.

The talk of heraldry and icons makes me think that the simplest way to implement something like that (though probably not one which works well) would be to use emoji. Alicorn could get the new unicorn emoji, Kappa could get the lowercase Greek letter (uppercase looks too much like a K), Marri could get Bride With Veil, Nemo could get a the tropical fish, etc.

But I don’t think icons would work as well even though iconspace is larger than colorspace. Colors don’t take up any screen real estate, they can be guaranteed to be present on phone screens which might send icons off the right of the screen, etc. I think background and border colors probably would work well, without having to decide when colors are close enough that somebody needs to switch to secondary, or what to do with authors guest starring for a few posts, or anything like that.

Other things to consider for visual distinguishably which might or might not be workable:
Different patterns (stripes, polka dots, plaid, brick pattern)
Flags, as long as nobody tries for something like Pocatello or Milwaukee.
Font styles

I don’t think any of those would be good, but they might give people ideas.

Emoji are evil.

Personally I really do think combinations of colors are our best bet for now.

(The references in the screenname are actually Eowyn, Odysseus, and Westley. I had forgot about the the fish and the submarine captain due to deep-seated pro-surface prejudice.)


If we're doing heraldry I want sable, five pallets argent couped in chief, a diminished bordure of the same. Probably messed up the vocabulary. This seems like it would be complicated to implement.

If we do color combinations would it matter if someone is green-cerulean or cerulean-green? For that matter, it is possible to be Green-Green?

(if we do symbols I want to reserve a moon because that is an alchemical symbol for silver)

Tossing the idea in of a small author ID thing? Like, labeling my stuff as 'LIN' afterward, Alicorn as 'ALI' or something? Can leave these as colored during a transition if needed/wanted.

Same idea, use numbers. Give 001 to Alicorn, so forth. Leave with colors for quicker memorization/extra flair?