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                     The Origin of the Crayon Color Picker

   Adam Engst

   Developer John Calhoun tells [1]the story of working on the Mac color
   picker in the mid-1990s, including how he independently added the
   crayon color picker without any oversight from design or marketing.

     It was frankly a thing I liked about working for Apple in those
     days. The engineers were the ones driving the ship. As I said, I
     wrote an HSV picker because it was, I thought, a more intuitive
     color space for artists. I wrote the HTML color picker because of
     the advent of the web. And I wrote the crayon picker because it
     seemed to me to be the kind of thing Apple was all about: HSL, RGB '
     these were kind of nerdy color spaces ' a box of crayons is how the
     rest of us picked colors.

     And it turned out, to my surprise, Apple shipped all the color
     pickers. No marketing or design person ever asked for them. But we,
     engineers, were not only programmers, we were also users and often
     had an intuitive sense of what other Macintosh users wanted. We knew
     what we wanted anyway. I was creating the things I would have
     wanted.

   Nowadays, if you want to create such things, you have to do it on your
   own, but even back then, there wasn't complete freedom within Apple.
   The rest of Calhoun's story explains how putting an Easter egg
   containing a few lines of poetry into the color picker almost got him
   fired, though another Easter egg that caused the crayons to wear out
   survived. At some point in the early days of Mac OS X, Apple moved the
   crayon colors to a custom color list and changed the graphical picker
   to show colored pencils, although the names stayed the same.

   On a related historical note, some of you might remember Calhoun's
   early Mac game [2]Glider, published by [3]Casady & Greene, from before
   he joined Apple.

   [4]Read original article

References

   Visible links
   1. https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/almostfired/almostfired.html
   2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(video_game)
   3. https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/commercial/commercial.html
   4. https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/almostfired/almostfired.html

   Hidden links:
   5. https://tidbits.com/uploads/2025/07/macOS-color-picker.png

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