Kate Morley is a software developer in the U.K. who developed the National Grid's live page showing where the power's coming from—only 20% fossil fuels, yay Britain. She describes how she designed the beautiful yet simple color pallette it uses. Morley applies elegant rules that account for how we see colors instead of abritrarily picking nice colors. [via Hacker News]
I designed the 12-bit rainbow palette for use on National Grid: Live. It consists of twelve colours chosen with consideration for how we perceive luminance, chroma, and hue … The palette uses a 12-bit colour depth, so each colour requires only four characters when specified as a hexadecimal colour code in a CSS or SVG file:
There are still an awful lot of similar blue-greens (the classic battle between mathematical color spaces and human perception) but now they're lovely blue-greens, and the loveliness is thanks to a normal luminance curve rather than artistic intutition.
I know this is an extremely nostalgia-broken thing to do, but I can't help but look at it as a retrogaming pallette. This is unreasonable because Morley's pallette is for highlight colors, not for representing images. With black and white and two greys (as are found on National Grid:Live site) we have a classic 16-color pallette, but there's still a lack of skin tones. Blowing out the luminosity curve gets us there… sort of…
