Hey, I’m Peter Donahue — also known as Color Nerd on YouTube and TikTok. I’m an artist and color theory educator, and my teaching leans heavily on perception science and color literacy. I make videos and posts, run in-person color theory workshops, and have given talks on color in various fields (design, medieval color theory, paint mixing, and so on). I designed and taught a series of online color theory courses for Drawing America, so check those out too!
Experimental Color Pickers
Currently, this website is where I’m posting experiments and visualizations of cool color stuff that I find interesting.
I’m currently kind of obsessed with the ISCC-NBS color naming system. In 1939, the Inter-Society Color Council partnered with the National Bureau of Standards to bring some order to the chaos of color naming in scientific studies, consumer goods, and so on. So they developed a system of modifiers and hue names using plain English terms. So, why not turn it into a color picker?
The system was codified in 1955 by Deane Judd and Kenneth Kelly in Color: Universal Language and Dictionary of Names, ultimately defining 267 named color blocks. The centroids are the “average” color of each block covered by a particular color name in a three-dimensional colorspace.
You know what else I love? The Optical Society of America’s Uniform Color Scales. An even more ambitious project that took even longer and ended up even more obscure! You can play with my visualization of that, too, and even use it to build palettes:
As I fiddle with other resources and visualizations, I’ll post them on this site!
The Digital Color Fidget
In 2024, I designed the Color Fidget. I created it in collaboration with The Gray Muse, who sold the Fidget as a pin and keychain in 2025. Well, we looked at the numbers (and the competition from Temu-style knockoffs!) and decided to discontinue the product. However, I thought the paradigm for choosing colors had merit. So I put together a digital version.
Anyway – thanks for stopping by, and feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions or feedback.