Building your color palette

> Ever used one of those fancy color palette generators? You know, the ones where you pick a starting color, tweak some options that probably include some musical jargon like "triad" or "major fourth", and are then bestowed the five perfect color swatches you should use to build your website?

> This calculated and scientific approach to picking the perfect color scheme is extremely seductive, but not very useful.

Just recently I wondered if there is any scientific basis behind these approaches. I skimmed all research papers that I could find but not a single one of them provided serious data based support. All justification for these methods I found were historical, i. e. artists used color wheels and different methods of color selection on the wheels for a long time.

My conclusion so far is: There is no science what so ever behind these color palette generators.

I only spent about a day on this research and I'm not an expert, so if anyone has some pointers to serious research in that direction I'd be happy to know.

Google how the human eye works. The rods and cones. Colour and harmony between colours is rooted in our biology. Your iphone screen looks very unnatural, unattractive, to a dog or a goose. They see very different colours than we.

Our affinity to bright red is tied to how we used it to identify ripe fruit. Notifications, things they want you to click/grab/poke work best in red. You dont see many brown buttons on websites. We dont like touching brown the way we do red.

For people with blue-yellow color blindness that page is a nightmare.

Great article, I especially liked:

> the ones that make you think of Facebook as "blue", even though it's really mostly grey.

which seems obvious in retrospect.

I'm colour-blind (mostly red-green, sometimes blue-green too, never pinned down exactly which type - or types - it is) so I have used those generators before, and I think they do have value for me or others that just think they don't have a good eye for colours that look good together.

The opening example shows a nauseous combination of colours, but actually what the article mainly addresses is the lightness of each - presumably one could get some good results with a 'palette generator', and then following the advice here with the generated palette as the 'base colours'.

Whether you see it as having science behind it or not really depends on what problem you're considering.

There are some interesting in-depth articles about how people build those palettes and ramps that you might find interesting:

https://uxplanet.org/designing-systematic-colors-b5d2605b15c

https://design.lyft.com/re-approaching-color-9e604ba22c88