Why the same colour can look different from one place to the next, why yellow looks brighter than blue, and what the research says about colour and mood.
How we see colour
Colour psychology is half real. People around the world agree on what colours mean, and that's well measured. The claims that colours change how you feel, perform or buy mostly faded when bigger studies tested them again. Here's which ones, why, and what to rely on instead.
18 min read
How we see colourBuilding a palette
Orange is the warmest hue and blue the coolest, and people everywhere agree on that. Everything in between is a comparison. Here's where research puts the line, why green and purple sit on it, and what that means for your palette.
11 min read
How we see colour
Every colour has three dimensions: hue, lightness and colourfulness. Your design app's hue, saturation and brightness sliders borrowed those names, but they don't measure them. Here's what each slider really does.
10 min read
How we see colour
Pure yellow and pure blue both read 50% lightness in your colour picker, yet yellow gives off almost 13 times as much light as blue, as your eye counts it. Here's why the picker's numbers mislead, which lightness numbers match your eyes, why vivid colours still look lighter than their number, and which greyscale check to trust.
12 min read
How we see colour
There's no single number for when two colours look different. The famous 'Delta E under 1 is invisible' table is one developer's own guess, expert estimates vary fifteen times over, and one unit covers 2,575 hex codes around a vivid blue but only 34 around mid grey. Here's what the number really means, and how to judge by eye instead.
18 min read
How we see colourContrast and accessibility
Your eye judges every colour against what surrounds it, so the same hex looks lighter on a dark page and darker on a light one. Thin lines and small text do the opposite. Here's why, how big the shift is, why a contrast checker can't see it, and what to do.
18 min read
HistoryHow we see colour
Every hex code is a point on a map drawn from the colour matches of 17 people in two London-area labs in the late 1920s. Here's who they were, why the numbers needed 'minus red', how the CIE fixed it in 1931, and why some new screens are starting to drift from it.
14 min read