Needs more consideration. The colors are not equally different.
edit: op originally specifically referred to yellow.
Obviously designing for bad screens and/or eyes are both very important considerations, though.
The tol palettes are the best looking colorblind friendly palettes to me. Most of the others get complaints from non colorblind users about looking bad/desaturated.
The top comment color palette also reminds me a lot of the viridis "turbo" palette, which is a more perceptually uniform on MATLAB's notoriously bad "jet" palette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space#Cylindrical...
I've not paid much attention to this aspect of CIELAB, but, oh, I see; if you go clockwise around the rectilinear representation you do get rainbow order.
The palette is so pretty, I wonder how the whole LCH color space quantized down to 4096 colors looks. I find limited bitdepth color spaces fascinating to look at, there's so many choices about how to represent color they can look wildly different.
CSS recently has been adding way more color features, here's the palette represented in oklch:
#817 → oklch(0.44 0.1815 335.38)
#a35 → oklch(0.51 0.1559 7.49)
#c66 → oklch(0.63 0.1298 21.44)
#e94 → oklch(0.75 0.1415 62.42)
#ed0 → oklch(0.88 0.18646 103.9148)
#9d5 → oklch(0.82 0.181 131.77)
#4d8 → oklch(0.80 0.1757 154.39)
#2cb → oklch(0.76 0.1298 184.05)
#0bc → oklch(0.72 0.123861 206.321)
#09c → oklch(0.64 0.129199 231.0549)
#36b → oklch(0.52 0.1448 260.03)
#639 → oklch(0.44 0.1603 303.37)
Our eyes are much more sensitive to Blue/Violet, and less sensitive to green. There's a bunch of maths behind the perceived responses of our eyes.
If you're interested you can calculate perceived differences in the LCh colorspace using something like CIEDE2000.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_difference#CIEDE2000)
A Rainbow with equal DE between colors would probably look better than this one with equal DL.
The main purpose of ΔE is specifying error tolerances for specified colors / measuring small differences between nearby colors, so that e.g. if you hire someone to paint a car or print a magazine you can check that their output matches expectation sufficiently. For colors that are significantly different ΔE isn't that helpful a practical tool.
This page has more information: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rg...
The loss is no longer having any intuition about what a color is just by seeing the numbers.
Lightness dictates how white or black a color is, chroma dictates how saturated it is, and hue is which angle on the color wheel it occupies. Varying these one at a time lets you intuitively pick colors that are close to one another in the space of human perception. And CIE Lab colors are especially nice because they cover more than the sRGB gamut that we're all used to defining with HSL or RGB, so you can really make the most of your fancy wide color gamut monitor.
Other than that, I agree that “chroma” is hard to reason about. But, at least it is easier to reason than the “a”/“b” parameters in “lab”.
OKLCH is really easy to work with. Once you have your palette it's easy to get correct shades and hues by tweaking some values. This works great with CSS custom properties.
jjgreen•4h ago
andelink•1h ago