The questions about colour that come up at work and at home, answered with the evidence attached. Every page separates established fact from convention, forecast and Colourwise’s own interpretation, and names its sources.
300 topics · 1186 evidence-labelled claims · 565 registered sources
How light, eyes, instruments and numbers describe colour.
How colour is measured with instruments rather than eyes: colorimeters, spectrophotometers, measurement geometry, standard observers and illuminants, and what a ΔE number does and does not tell you..
11 topics
RGB, CMYK, HSL, Lab, OKLCH, Munsell, NCS and the rest: what each was designed for, why they disagree about the same colour, and which to use for which job..
12 topics
The sky, the sea, snow, fog and sunset each change colour for a physical reason, and so do the places people look at colour: galleries, shops, stages and night-time streets.
15 topics
Why colour changes between devices and media, and how professionals control it.
Why the same HEX value looks different on two screens, what sRGB, Display P3 and Rec.
15 topics
Why a print does not match the screen, what happens to a bright blue in CMYK, why a black prints brown, and when a spot colour is worth it.
14 topics
How a camera turns light into colour, why phones disagree with each other, why product photos lie, and how to get colour you can trust from a photograph..
12 topics
Colour on real surfaces: how it is manufactured, how it behaves and how it ages.
How colour is manufactured: pigments, dyes, lakes and inks; opacity and tinting strength; lightfastness; effect and interference pigments; colour that changes with heat, light or voltage; and what happens to colourants when material is recycled..
19 topics
Why colour fades, yellows and darkens, how conservators measure and slow it, and what light exposure actually costs a painting, a photograph or a curtain..
14 topics
How colour works on a shelf and on a product: category conventions, what research does and does not show about colour and expectation, finishes, the gap between the digital pack and the printed one, and how colour and decoration choices affect whether packaging can be sorted and recycled..
14 topics
The chemistry behind the colour of food: the pigments plants and animals make, what cooking, acidity and oxygen do to them, and how the colour of coffee, beer, wine, tea and honey is graded..
16 topics
Colour with a job: safety, public space, charts and software.
The colours that are specified rather than chosen: safety signs, pipe and cable identification, signal lights, navigation lights and accessibility requirements.
12 topics
Colour at the scale of buildings and streets: façades, heritage districts, hospitals, stations and wayfinding, glare, and the measurable effect of a surface's reflectance on heat..
10 topics
Choosing colour for charts and maps: categorical, sequential and diverging palettes, why rainbow scales mislead, and how to keep a chart readable in greyscale, dark mode and for colour-vision deficiency..
11 topics
Colour as infrastructure in software: semantic tokens, state colours, dark mode, focus indicators and theming, and how to build a palette that survives every screen it lands on..
10 topics
What colour everyday life actually is, how it changed, and what forecasters claim.
How the visible colour of everyday things has changed, measured where measurement exists: cars, consumer objects, interiors and products.
7 topics
Car colour is the best-documented colour market there is: industry reports have counted the colour of new vehicles for decades.
7 topics
Every year several organisations each announce their own 'colour of the year'.
6 topics
Symptom-first diagnosis across paint, screens, print, photos and materials.
Topics added to longer-standing sections of the site.