palettecore

Derive, optimise and audit a scientific colour palette from one seed colour.

Existing tools let researchers pick established colour maps. This one starts from the researcher's own anchor colour and returns a palette plus its diagnostics — because "harmonised" and "accessible" are separate properties, and a generator that returns bare HEX codes is hiding the second one.

Grounded in Crameri, Shephard & Heron (2020), The misuse of colour in science communication, Nature Communications 11:5444.

Four palettes from one seed each, every one carrying its audit (tools/make_gallery.py regenerates this). The bottom row is a helix through OKLCH — designed lightness climbs while hue rotates — a multi-hue sequential scale whose returned colours are checked for greyscale and simulated-CVD order. It came out of a small cross-modal art experiment (see Does music have a colour? below).

Free and open source, Apache-2.0. Python core now; R package with scale_colour_accessible() / scale_fill_accessible() in r/, checked against the same fixtures.

What it checks (not "verifies")

Every palette ships with:

• adjacent / pairwise CIEDE2000 distances under normal vision
• the same distances under simulated protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia
• lightness monotonicity and relative luminance (a greyscale proxy — real print output depends on the printer's colour management)
• sRGB gamut status (chroma is clamped, never channel-clipped)
• WCAG contrast against the declared background, judged by declared use
• warnings whenever a threshold is not met — the honest output for seeds that cannot satisfy every constraint at once

Every diagnostic is computed on the 8-bit quantised colours actually returned as HEX (since 0.2.2), so the audit describes exactly the palette you receive.

Install

pip install palettecore

install.packages("palettecore", repos = "https://heidihelena.r-universe.dev")
# CRAN submission under review

Usage

Python:

from palettecore import generate_palette

result = generate_palette(
    seed="#8B6FC9",
    n=8,
    kind="sequential",   # or "diverging", "categorical", "helix"
    background="#FFFFFF",
    use="data_fill",     # or "text", "line", "UI"
    anchor="path",       # or "exact" — see Stated conventions
)
result.hexes         # 8 HEX codes
result.diagnostics   # the audit
result.warnings      # what did NOT pass

Command line (also the agent-friendly entry point — --format json returns the full machine-readable audit):

python3 -m palettecore "#8B6FC9" -n 8 --kind sequential --format json

Choosing a seed (and n)

Some seeds start inside a known failure zone; the map is in docs/seed-guidance.md (reproducible with tools/seed_sweep.py). The short version, under package-default thresholds:

• One seed that serves both kinds: L 0.55–0.75, chroma ≥ 0.12, hue 30°–270°.
• Sequential ramps from seed hues ~340°–15° fail deuteranopia at n = 8; 285°–300° is tritanopia-tight (the pale end warns first as n grows).
• Categorical's failure zone is murky chroma (~0.05–0.09) — commit to colour (≥ 0.12) or to near-grey, not the band between.
• n dominates: a one-hue sequential ramp holds 5–7 steps comfortably, 8 is near the ceiling for every hue, 9+ fails everywhere tested.

Region guidance never replaces the per-palette audit; the diagnostics that ship with your palette are the numbers that bind.

Vividness. A muted seed gives a muted family (the default is seed-faithful). If a palette reads too dusty, raise vividness from 0.0 toward 1.0 — it lifts chroma toward the gamut edge without touching lightness, so sequential monotonicity, equal-step spacing and the exact seed anchor are all preserved, and the default reproduces earlier versions exactly. More chroma also tends to improve separation, so vivid and accessible are usually allies, not opposites.

generate_palette("#B57EDC", n=8, kind="categorical", vividness=0.6)

How it works

All work happens in OKLCH (path construction, gamut clamping) with CIEDE2000 as the distance metric. Nothing is interpolated in RGB or HSL.

• Sequential — a dense OKLCH path at the seed hue (monotonic lightness, chroma envelope scaled by seed chroma, gamut-clamped per stop), then n stops chosen by arc-length reparametrisation: equal spacing in cumulative CIEDE2000, so near-equal perceptual steps hold by construction rather than by free optimisation.
• Categorical — seed anchored exactly, then greedy farthest-point placement on a constrained hue circle (lightness band, moderated chroma), followed by swap-improvement passes on the maximin objective: maximise the minimum pairwise distance across normal vision and all three CVD simulations.
• Diverging — two sequential halves meeting at a near-neutral light centre. The second pole (seed hue + 180°) is a design assumption and is flagged as such in the warnings.
• Helix — a cubehelix-inspired path through OKLCH: designed OKLab lightness steps evenly while hue rotates rotations full turns from the seed. It is a multi-hue sequential scale, but hue-dependent luminance can still reverse after gamut mapping or simulated CVD. The audit therefore reports normal greyscale order, cvd_luminance_monotonic, and adjacent separation instead of assuming safety from the construction. Because the hue sweeps regardless of where it starts, the seed mainly sets the start hue and baseline chroma.

generate_palette("#B84A3C", n=8, kind="helix", rotations=1.4, vividness=0.4)

Stated conventions

These are the decisions a reader needs before trusting any number the audit reports.

White point. sRGB is interpreted under its native D65 illuminant throughout; the CIELAB reference white is D65 and no chromatic adaptation to D50 (or anything else) occurs anywhere. CIELAB/CIEDE2000 values are D65-relative.

CVD model. Machado, Oliveira & Fernandes (2009) matrices at severity 1.0 on the paper's [0, 1] scale (some libraries write the same endpoint as 100). Severity 1.0 simulates complete dichromacy; the milder anomalous trichromacies are not modelled, so a palette passing here has been checked against the extreme case only. The matrices are used as published — no fixture-level parity with other implementations (colorspacious, colorblindr, …) has been established, and their pipelines may differ.

CVD gamut policy. The Machado transform can leave displayable sRGB. Simulated colours are clamped channel-wise in linear RGB, because the clamped colour is what a display actually shows — audit distances are measured on displayed colours. The pre-clamp excursion magnitude is reported in the diagnostics (cvd_gamut.max_linear_excursion_before_clamp) so you can see when clamping may have distorted a measured separation.

Seed anchoring. Categorical palettes always contain the seed exactly. For sequential/diverging the seed defines the path (hue + chroma envelope) but the exact HEX is not guaranteed to appear; anchor="exact" snaps the nearest stop to the seed at the cost of slightly uneven spacing, and the audit reports seed_nearest_stop_deltaE under either policy.

Thresholds. The ΔE floors (normal ≥ 8, each CVD condition ≥ 6) are package-default design rules, not established universal accessibility cut-offs. They are configurable (thresholds=), recorded in every result (thresholds_used), and labelled as defaults there too.

Determinism. No random state anywhere — candidate grids, greedy selection and swap passes are deterministic, so identical inputs always give identical palettes. No seed to store.

Dependencies

numpy only. All colour science — OKLab/OKLCH, CIELAB, CIEDE2000, the Machado matrices — is implemented in-package so the numbers are inspectable and portable.

Tests and cross-language parity

python3 -m pytest tests/ -q

123 tests, including a pathological-seed battery (pure primaries, near-black, near-white, neutrals) and no-false-pass checks (impossible constraints must warn, never silently pass).

fixtures/parity.json (regenerate with tools/make_fixtures.py) is the cross-language contract: conversions and distances must match within 1e-6, palette HEX codes exactly. The R implementation in r/ is validated against it — one reference algorithm, two frontends.

Does music have a colour?

An inclusive art experiment built on the same engine lives in experiments/: map the 12 pitch classes to a helix through colour space — angle = pitch class, height = lightness = pitch. Every note gets a colour; a rising scale traces the same kind of cubehelix-inspired path shown above.

It is framed as art, not a tool, on purpose. The pitch-class → hue mapping is a designed convention (Newton and Scriabin chose different colours for C), so the piece asks the question rather than answering it. What the audit can say honestly is worked out in the experiment's README, minimum-not-mean: octave pairs remain strongly separated in the simulations, while fine semitone identity does not survive CVD and the protanopia simulation contains four small local luminance reversals. The frontier sweep finds that ≤4 pitch classes per octave clears this package's exploratory ΔE design floor in the tested simulations; that floor is not a human-validated guarantee. The colours can enrich the shared artwork, but they do not replace sound, labels, position, or another redundant encoding.

Roadmap

• PyPI packaging (pip install palettecore)
• CRAN release (submitted, under review)
• use="text" mode that constrains generation, not just warns
• Configurable severity (<1.0) for the CVD simulations
• Fixture-level comparison against colorspacious/colorblindr
• Vectorised CIEDE2000 for faster categorical generation (currently ~1.7s for n=8, ~17s for n=24 on one Apple-silicon test machine)
• A methods/validation document