OIMU 352 Colour Wheel — a ColorDisk-based palette tool

Controls

Harmony

How this works

Turn the wheel; the fixed pointers read the colours beneath them, and the selected segments are framed from centre to rim. Complements sit directly opposite, as perception (not pigment) dictates.

Gamut mask

How this works

James Gurney's method: colours outside the window are blacked out and excluded. Rotate the wheel to audition different slices of the palette; everything revealed shares a coherent range.

Colours

Tap any cell on the wheel to list the palette colours placed there. Grey cells hold none.

Science overlays

What these show

Warm / cool edges: approximate spectral edge-colour circuits from the ColorDisk. Hues centred in the loops are safest for colour-vision-deficient viewers.

Trillium: Peter Donahue's pigment-mixing overlay. Paint does not mix on straight lines; mixing paths bow toward the additive primaries (CIECAM02 hues 32°, 136°, 258°).

Value view: strips hue away and paints each cell by lightness (CIECAM02 J), so you can judge the value structure of a palette the way a painter squints at a scene.

CVD: simulates deuteranopia or protanopia (Machado et al. 2009) on the wheel. Copied values are never altered.

Special thanks to Peter T. Donahue (@color.nerd) for the invaluable colour nerdery and Shin Sohyun of OIMU (and my favourite designer) for the Color 352 project that inspired the creation of this tool.

The Wada palette is Sanzo Wada's Haishoku Soukan (1933–34), digitised as dictionary-of-colour-combinations by Matt DesLauriers (MIT), after Dain M. Blodorn Kim. 159 colours converted from the book's CMYK through U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 to sRGB. Source scans: National Diet Library, Japan. Public domain since 2017.

The Ridgway palette is Robert Ridgway's Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912), 1,115 colours sampled directly from the 53 plates of the Smithsonian Libraries copy held by the Internet Archive. Screen values are measured from a 114-year-old printed book and carry its fading; names are read by OCR and about one in nine still holds a stray character.

The Werner palette is Abraham Gottlob Werner's Nomenclature of Colours as revised by Patrick Syme (1821), 110 colours in ten families, the book Darwin carried aboard the Beagle. Colour values are taken from Nicholas Rougeux's digital edition (my other favourite designer!), who sampled them from a scanned first edition. The original book is public domain; the digitisation is his work.

Colour science after The ColorDisk 7.1 by Peter T. Donahue, CC BY-NC 2.0. Wheel hue & chroma: CIECAM02 (D65, average surround). Screen colours are approximations; the original CMYK/LAB values are the truth and are exported untouched.

This resource was designed by David Calum Millar. A custom agent called Morna, running on Claude (Anthropic) and trained on the Creative Compass framework by David Calum Millar, helped with the coding and development.

Controls

3D · OKLCH

Shell opacity

Reading the mountain range

Lightness runs left (light) to right (dark), hue runs along the bottom into the distance, and chroma builds the mountains. Every palette colour floats on or under the sRGB ridge line.

Slide opacity up to solidify the mountain — at full opacity the palette dots step aside entirely. Drag to rotate; drag with two fingers (or hold shift, or use the right mouse button) to pan. Scroll or pinch to zoom — the zoom homes in on wherever your cursor or pinch sits. The labels fade as you close in.

Keyboard: WASD or arrow keys orbit the map; shift + arrows pan; + and − zoom; 0 resets the view.

Model inspired by oklch.com (Evil Martians). Alpha is not stored in .ase, so all colours are shown opaque.

Special thanks to Peter T. Donahue (@color.nerd) for the invaluable colour nerdery and Shin Sohyun of OIMU (one of my favourite designers) for the Color 352 project that inspired the creation of this tool.