The Origin of the Crayon Color Picker

Developer John Calhoun tells 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 Glider, published by Casady & Greene, from before he joined Apple.

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