What It Is
Two small tools built around the xkcd color survey, a crowdsourced dataset of 954 human-readable color names mapped to RGB values. The dataset sees broad use across research and data visualization — matplotlib ships it natively, and the named colors are a practical alternative to manually curating hex codes for figures.
xkcd_rgb is a lookup function that returns any named xkcd color as an RGB triplet scaled 0-1. The interactive browser plots the full survey in polar coordinates: hue on the angular axis, perceptual luminance (CIELAB L*) on the radial axis. Hovering a datapoint returns the hex code and string identifier, making it straightforward to pick colors of matching luminance or complementary hue for consistent figure design.