What Colors Are We?

Character creators, digital art tools and games tend to offer skin tones as a handful of swatches, or as a region of a general-purpose color space where the useful range is scattered and hard to sample fairly. What Colors Are We? is an article and an interactive tool that defines a compact space for simplified skin tones instead, using simple equations.

It ships a color picker written in JavaScript alongside a Python sample that draws points uniformly from the space for procedural generation, with JavaScript equivalents sitting in the page source. The write-up walks through what each axis of the picker adjusts and why the space ends up shaped the way it does, addressed to game developers, tool builders and artists who want a defensible way to represent a range of people. The math is published openly for anyone to take.