The website is awesome, however, I am not sure if the palettes are very useful.

It is a very nice palette generator, but I really dislike all the talk of magic/mysticism/sorcery/witchcraft. It's a dang color generator, ease up on the dungeon master language.

My guess is the prompt was something like this:

"describe a color palette generating tool that uses the magic of polar coordinates to make pretty color palettes"

"And thus, the tome of "poline" has been written. Its mystical powers, steeped in the arcane knowledge of the ancients, now reside within these pages. May this compendium serve you in your quest for the ultimate color palette."

Either way, I wasn't expecting to encounter Poe's law inside a color palette maker.

The literature on hue harmony is fuzzy, but there are a few gems.

Check out Matsuda [1] who tracked the colors of what his female students were wearing, and tried to identify any principles informing their color choice. My criticism of him is that he plotted hue distribution on the RGB color wheel. The RYB wheel would have been a far better choice. His paper is in Japanese, but is summarized in multiple places. Below [2] is a link to 2 pages from a lecture I gave which summarizes his findings.

I'm sure you also know of Kuehni's classic tome on color spaces [3]. A fun and informative read.

There has been no research on hue antagonism (which is the idea that underpins complementary pairs). This is crazy, as it would be a very easy subject to investigate. To me it is obvious that there is a special relationship between antagonistic pairs above the fact that they mix to neutral. Supporting this is the fact that Leondro DaVinci documented this relationship even before hue circle was invented [4]!

As for the mystical dimension of color harmony... this has been assumed since the dawn of color science. Newton himself believed that there was seven colors in his hue circle for no other reason than this was a spiritually significant value [5]. Itten [6], Goethe [7] and Kandinsky [8] all absolutely believed in the spiritual dimension of color. Personally, I believe that their work has had nothing but a destructive impact on how artists and designers use color. It is wildly inconsistent, vague and often plain wrong.

[1] Matsuda: Color Design. Asakura Shoten (in Japanese). (1995)

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4ac93etjyg0z5y2ouq5ge/matsuda...

[3] Kuehni, R.: Color Space and its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present. Wiley-Interscience, Hoboken (2003)

[4] Leonardo da Vinci, Trans. J. F. Rigaud, A Treatise on Painting (London: J.B. Nichols & Son, 1835).

[5] Matt Chamings “Why are there seven colours in a rainbow?” New Scientist, Last Word, 2021.

[6] Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1961).

[7] J. W. v. Goethe, Goethe's Colour Theory, Trans. C. L. Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840).

[8] Wassily Kandinsky, Trans. Michael Sadler, Concerning the spiritual in art (Penguin UK, 2024), p. 59.