Is the background color of the ELU SE website based on the background color of the Etymonline website?

Question

I was surfing etymonline and I found its background color exactly identical to the one of our beloved site. Is ELU’s background color based on Etymonline’s or is Etymonline’s based on ELU’s?

Answer 1

1. I was surfing etymonline and I found its background color exactly identical to the one of our beloved site.

“Exactly identical” ? Really? :)

Because the perception of color occurs only in the mind of the viewer mediated by the exceedingly complex human vision system, it is not for me to say whether what you perceived to be ‘identical’ in your own mind happens to be ‘true’ or ‘false’. The observer is always honest to himself regarding his own perceptions.

But perceptions differ wildly between observers depending on a multitude of factors including ambient lighting, monitor settings, biological chemistry including such things as (typically male-pattern) deuteranopia, physical changes to that person’s lens which grows ever dimmer and yellower with age, and each person’s unique visual-processing neurology, not to mention various cultural and psychological biases including confirmation bias.

Given all that vaguery, all I can do here is play by the numbers, which are constant integers blessèdly free of any trompe-l’œil effects. When doing so, only one conclusion is possible.

EL🙵U Page Element RGB Colors

Here on a scale of 0 through 255 are the respective RGB values used for various elements on our site’s main page:

EL🙵U Element	Red	Green	Blue
display text	59	64	69
body text	35	38	41
link text	174	55	55
general background	252	250	243
deleted post background	253	242	242
header/footer background	244	227	201

Etymonline Page Element RGB Colors

In contrast, here are the respective RGB values used for various elements on the Etymonline web site’s main page:

Etymonline Element	Red	Green	Blue
display text	38	38	36
body text	85	85	85
red text	131	0	29
knockout text on red background	228	223	202
footer knockout text	136	136	136
general background	255	252	243
border and footer background	241	236	215
red background	131	4	29
bottommost footer	34	34	34
uparrow background in footer	171	169	155
submit button unfocused	255	244	196
submit button focused	255	237	154

As you can see, when playing strictly by the numbers, there are no elements whose integer RGB triples are numerically identical from one web site to the next.

2. Is ELU’s background color based on Etymonline’s or Etymonline’s based on ELU’s?

Given the lack of numeric equivalence, this seems rather unlikely. Our site theme was designed long, long ago by site user #4, Jin, who is a a talented and tasteful SE employee with a gift for design. I suppose we could ask her whether she recalls, but I don’t believe your conjecture to be true.

Rather, similar underlying motivations may well have led to similarities in choices of hue. That’s because both sites strove to emulate certain old-time manuscript colors seen on slightly yellowed pages combined with all rubricators’ and typesetters’ standard second color choice of some variant on the hue of red.

That’s why, in a very vague way, the color schemes of the two sites follow similar trends. That likely led you to seeing the parallels between them.

But their respective element colors are in no fashion exactly equivalent numerically when looked at under that most exacting of lenses: that of the computer.