Download
Palette Designer facilitates designing color codes for electronic visual displays that comply with established human factors usability principles. It calculates colorimetric figures of merit for a user-specified color set and flags colors and color combinations that may be problematic. It also draws figures that help users visualize important characteristics of the color set and find ways to improve it. It can be used by itself or in conjunction with software that uses aesthetic considerations such as color harmony to create color sets.
Palette Designer consists of an Excel spreadsheet, supplemented with Visual Basic macros. It has been tested under Office 2010 and 2016 for Windows and Office 2011 and 2016 for Mac. It is not compatible with LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice.
Features
- Accommodates palettes containing as many as 25 colors
- Displays the palette in a swatch chart to support subjective assessment; can use a display characterization file to reproduce the colors with high colorimetric accuracy
- Plots the palette on the CIE 1976 u'v' chromaticity diagram
- Draws the palette's protan, deutan, and tritan confusion lines to aid assessing usability by people with color vision deficiencies
- Tabulates each color's sRGB values
- Tabulates the luminance-contrast ratio for each color against the background color (predicts legibility)
- Tabulates the size-corrected CIELUV color difference for each color pair (predicts search speed)
- Tabulates the CIELAB color difference for each color pair (predicts discriminability)
- Calculations account for ambient illumination falling on the display screen
- Flags colors and pairs that violate human factors standards
- Interface allows users to adjust the colors easily and see the results immediately
- Aids complying with FAA HF-STD-010 (Color Use in Air Traffic Control System Displays) and other human factors standards
Project Samples
