apel/generate-colour-palette

Some tests in generating a visual perception corrected colour palette for Grafana

Thu 14 Apr 15:14:29 BST 2022

This repository contains some small tests generating perceptual colour palettes for Grafana. These were intended for use in the IRIS Accounting Portal. Currently there is a tool compile the Grafana colour mapping config from a set of fixed colours generated by some web service. The idea was to automate the palette generator with a local script, and to have that script generate more accessible colours.

The tool attempts to select colours which are equidistant in the human perceptual space (using CIELAB) for any number of colours, therefore making them more distinguishable. It is possible to pick a set of colours in HSV, H being the "colour" equally spaced around a circle, but these vary in brightness and distinguishability depending on the wavelength. It is not as easy to pick a set of equidistant colours in a nonparametric space (CIELAB), so an optimiser is used to nudge the colours as far away as possible from each other as would be seen by a person.

Currently the tool is not very useful when compared to the simpler approach of using a web tool to optimise the colours. But it does mean that it still needs to be handled manually when new data fields are added to the palette.

This repository acts to archive the attempts made and you are encouraged to pick up the work if it becomes relevant again.