Unlocking Colors
The assumption is that using another color space (like proposed CIE) would unlock mathematical manipulation of color palettes in design. I don&#x27;t think this is true.<p>Our eyes are very sensitive to color shades and we&#x27;ll easily notice if something is off. Colors are carefully picked by designers to fit together in quite subjective and non-mathematical manner. From observing some well constructed palettes, I derived the basic process used to create them. Pick the approximate colors you want, arrange them so they are all visible, and then tweak color shades so that all of them could exist under same lightning conditions in physical world. If some color seems jarring or wrong, that&#x27;s because it could only exist under different lightning from rest of palette.<p>The text seems to neglect the vast amount of information lost when we use just a single point in color space to represent the whole light spectrum. For example, magenta signifies presence of both bluish and reddish wavelengths. If your math is not based on spectrum components, how do you hope to arrive to correct color when mixing two spectrums? Linear interpolation between two points in color space?<p>I think HSL is huge improvement over RGB model for designers, but other color spaces aren&#x27;t really worth the effort. If you need light and dark theme for your UI, both will need to be hand crafted. Shifting hues by 5% or calculating complementary color won&#x27;t be good enough.