Just a colour palette

Making a robust colour palette is incredibly difficult. Try asking someone to pick out the colour “pink” from a selection and you will find that not only do our minds play tricks on us, but also people just have completely different perceptions and definitions of each colour.

The goal was simple, to create a common language for colours for internal usage. What will be our “green”? To add a bit of sophistication we decided to add some sugar to this language to include blends: green-yellowish anyone?

Then there is the open question of colour relativity. We added the concept of context to our language: green-yellowish-onwhite, green-yellowish-onblack. However there are no common tables or functions to help correct for relativity. This goal may be a fool’s errand due to relativity being more complicated than just producing a new colour code. Does colour perception change depending on how long you look at the image or focus on one region?

This would be very interesting to do a larger survey of how people perceive colours. What might be a good sample size?