We developed the HLC* Colour Atlas and see it as a new basis for all stages of professional colour communication – from design to the final product. The printed atlas is the central tool. The ring binder contains 2040 CIELAB-HLC colours (over 13.000 in the XL Version), which are systematically arranged by hue/base colour, lightness/brightness and chroma/saturation. The atlas is an exemplary implementation of the CIELAB colour space, which was introduced by the Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage in 1976 and has since established itself worldwide in colour management, colour measurement and colour formulation. The model has great advantages: The project is completely based on open standards – for colour definitions it is the CIELAB colour model, for the production of physical samples it is proof printing systems according to ISO 12647-7 and for the exchange of spectral data it is the CxF file format. All data is published under CreativeCommons license. This means: All users can freely use the developed colour data and samples and further develop them.
Why do we need perceptually uniform color spaces? Because working with color in code is different than working with color in traditional design tools. Traditional tools encourage designers to think in manual workflows with the color picker as the primary way of choosing color combinations. In this scenario, designers use their eyes to decide whether a color is right or wrong, and the RGB values play no role in this decision. Code is different, because programming languages encourage designers to think about colors as numbers or positions within the chosen color model. This skill is hard to learn if the numbers do not correspond with the output. Perceptually uniform color spaces allow us to align numbers in our code with the visual effect perceived in our viewers.
Color input is processed at every stage of the nervous system, starting from the retina, and the experience of color is affected by numerous contextual and historical factors. Nevertheless, in broad strokes we can describe a color by three numbers. A common trope in science and math is that if we can describe an object by a set of numbers, we can think of these numbers as its coordinates in an abstract space, with each point in the space corresponding to a different object, and we can study the geometry of the space
