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> especially since there’s no real science or theory behind it (that I know of).

The literature on hue harmony is fuzzy, but there are a few gems.

Check out Matsuda [1] who tracked the colors of what his female students were wearing, and tried to identify any principles informing their color choice. My criticism of him is that he plotted hue distribution on the RGB color wheel. The RYB wheel would have been a far better choice. His paper is in Japanese, but is summarized in multiple places. Below [2] is a link to 2 pages from a lecture I gave which summarizes his findings.

I'm sure you also know of Kuehni's classic tome on color spaces [3]. A fun and informative read.

There has been no research on hue antagonism (which is the idea that underpins complementary pairs). This is crazy, as it would be a very easy subject to investigate. To me it is obvious that there is a special relationship between antagonistic pairs above the fact that they mix to neutral. Supporting this is the fact that Leondro DaVinci documented this relationship even before hue circle was invented [4]!

As for the mystical dimension of color harmony... this has been assumed since the dawn of color science. Newton himself believed that there was seven colors in his hue circle for no other reason than this was a spiritually significant value [5]. Itten [6], Goethe [7] and Kandinsky [8] all absolutely believed in the spiritual dimension of color. Personally, I believe that their work has had nothing but a destructive impact on how artists and designers use color. It is wildly inconsistent, vague and often plain wrong.

[1] Matsuda: Color Design. Asakura Shoten (in Japanese). (1995)

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4ac93etjyg0z5y2ouq5ge/matsuda...

[3] Kuehni, R.: Color Space and its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present. Wiley-Interscience, Hoboken (2003)

[4] Leonardo da Vinci, Trans. J. F. Rigaud, A Treatise on Painting (London: J.B. Nichols & Son, 1835).

[5] Matt Chamings “Why are there seven colours in a rainbow?” New Scientist, Last Word, 2021.

[6] Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1961).

[7] J. W. v. Goethe, Goethe's Colour Theory, Trans. C. L. Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840).

[8] Wassily Kandinsky, Trans. Michael Sadler, Concerning the spiritual in art (Penguin UK, 2024), p. 59.

I love the "old internet" vibe with the new internet look. I think it's a very creative idea, I wouldn't mind the haters too too much. I love it!

It's a neat tool but some usability feedback. With third party JS disabled the failure mode is a blank window if any of 3 core domains are blocked. I'm accustomed to a bit of breakage given how I do things but catastrophic failure when any single item is missing makes it needlessly difficult to debug.

Hi OP. I don't know if you'll see this, but the 300 weight text is hard to read on a regular (96ppi) screen. If you're interested, you can use the `resolution` CSS media query to increase the font weight on just low-density devices.

Great work and a wonderful presentation

It feels a bit satirical or otherwise done for fun, especially with sections like the following.

"And thus, the tome of "poline" has been written. Its mystical powers, steeped in the arcane knowledge of the ancients, now reside within these pages. May this compendium serve you in your quest for the ultimate color palette."

Either way, I wasn't expecting to encounter Poe's law inside a color palette maker.

What don't you understand? It defies conventional color science and is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century.

It is a very nice palette generator, but I really dislike all the talk of magic/mysticism/sorcery/witchcraft. It's a dang color generator, ease up on the dungeon master language.

It's enigmatic, hence you don't understand.

There's no science behind it. You're reading ai generated text.

My guess is the prompt was something like this:

"describe a color palette generating tool that uses the magic of polar coordinates to make pretty color palettes"

Works on my Firefox on Windows.

The website is awesome, however, I am not sure if the palettes are very useful.

Wow, I didn't even realise you could scroll down! Much more flexible than I first thought.

thanks! Collecting them has been my hobby for the past few years: https://github.com/meodai/color-names

thanks! that means a lot

Polar Lines -> poline