The 12-bit rainbow palette

The 12-bit rainbow palette 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: #817 #a35 #c66 #e94 #ed0 #9d5 #4d8 #2cb #0bc #09c #36b #639 Designing the palette Computers define colours in terms of red, green, and blue components, which are treated equally. However, we perceive these components as having differing luminance: compared to a pure red, a pure green looks much brighter and a pure blue looks much darker. As a result, a simple RGB rainbow palette has large changes in luminance between neighbouring colours. This can be seen by converting colours to greys of equal perceived luminance: The LCH colour space is an alternative to the RGB colour space that defines colours in terms of luminance, chroma, and hu ... Read full article.