This is a partial disclosure of how a color enters the archive. It is not the whole method. Enough is written down here that you can judge whether the archive is rigorous, and model how it thinks about what it keeps. The rest stays with the maker for now. Later versions will say more, and they will be dated when they do.
What counts as a color in this archive
I have to have stood in front of the object. That is the first rule, and the one I will not bend. A color enters the archive only after an encounter in the physical world — a petal I pinched between two fingers at the Collingwood grain terminal, the iron of a century bridge at 4:10 PM, low tide — not a screen, not a memory, not a reference.
There has to be a photograph of the source. The photograph is the witness. It documents where the color came from; it is not where the color came from. I say this twice, in two places, because people keep collapsing the two. The photograph documents the source. The color is pulled from the object, not from the image.
There has to be a hex. The hex is the compressed form of the encounter — the thing I can hand to a press, a screen, a weaver, a dyer. It is the smallest honest thing I can save.
Optionally, and increasingly, the token carries more. Substrate — wood, stone, petal, paint, rust. Light — the time of day, the weather, the direction. Witness — the person standing next to me, if there was one. Confidence — how sure I am that what I measured is what I saw. Session — which trip, which day. Coordinates — where in the world. These live under sampling on the token, and I add them when the encounter rewards them. None of them are required. The tokenId is the name until I write one. A good tokenId does enough of the work.
What disqualifies a color
A swatch pulled from a photograph. This is the one that matters most. If I could have eyedroppered it out of an image I already had, it does not belong. An image is a record, not a source.
A color that cannot be placed in a specific object. "A nice blue from somewhere near Lake Huron" is a note, not a token. If I cannot name the object, the object did not teach me anything the archive can repeat.
A color produced by the archive's own printing. A print is an artifact; the press is a translator; the ink is a decision. What comes out the other side is a different kind of thing. It deserves its own record and its own language, and I will write those eventually, but it is not a source token.
What gets recorded about the encounter
What the object was — the substrate, in plain words. What the light was doing. What the weather was. Who was there. How sure I am. Which session, on which day. Where in the world the object stood. Not all of these, every time. Increasingly most of them, for new encounters. Retroactive tokens — the ones I brought forward from older spreadsheets — often carry only method: 'legacy-csv' and the essentials. I mark them honestly. I do not pretend a 2023 row has a 2026 richness.
Sensory notes sit alongside this as voluntary enrichment. I write them when the encounter rewards writing. I do not write them to satisfy a counter.
What is not disclosed, and why
The physical technique — how the tool meets the object, what it does, how the measurement becomes a hex — stays with me. That is the one thing I keep for the archive as craft-labor. I bring the measuring tool to the object. That is about the limit of what I will say in public at v0.3.
The reason is not mystique. The reason is that the method is the only thing that is mine to keep. Everything else — the photographs, the places, the notes, the tokens, the way the archive is organized — I want to be readable, legible, and eventually open. The method is how the archive earns its living.
I will use the word once. This is proprietary. It is a boundary, not a posture.
Retirement
Some colors are ephemeral. A flower that was open on a Tuesday afternoon and gone by Thursday. A weathered board that was scraped off and repainted. A light that only existed at that hour. When I know a source is no longer there, the token is marked with ephemeral: true and a retiredAt date. It does not disappear. It stays visible in the archive. It just stops being presented as a color you can still go out and touch.
A weathering bridge that still stands is a different kind of token. It changes, but it has not retired. I treat those two cases differently, and the archive marks the difference.
On being a draft
This is v0.3. It is a draft that knows it is a draft. The sampling system is younger than the writing about it, and the writing is younger than the philosophy. All three are still settling. I expect to revise this as I learn which rules actually hold up at the edges — as I meet colors that want to break them, and as the archive grows into the kind of thing that has to explain itself more carefully.
When the next version ships, it will be dated, and the diff will be honest.