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Do you think of brown as a color in its own right, or as just a kind of orange? How do you use colors in projects? The red-green-blue color system familiar to programmers is just the right thing for manufacturers of computer monitors, but isn't so helpful for developing intuitions about color perception. (Okay, mix blue and green, and it's not a surprise that you get cyan, which is sort of blueish and sort of greenish. But why on earth should mixing red and green look yellow?) The Colors and Crayons library is an attempt to make things easy for users who just want continuously varying colors and don't care about the details, and also make things easy for users to get specific colors by name, while also giving color nerds fine control over color display in perceptually meaningful scales. In this talk I'll introduce the reasoning behind the design of the library, and say a thing or two about the perils of trying to make it fast enough to satisfy users.