Experiments with color gradients

April 07, 2016

Gus Mueller posted a tweet asking which is the best way to draw a gradient recently, which triggered me to formalize an idea I’ve had for some time.

It has bothered me that some color gradients are not perceptually uniform. Some have a dark spot in the middle and some are easily divided into separate regions. It should be possible to re-distribute the colors such that the change is perceptually uniform.

I wrote the following experiment to test if it would be something usable.

Interactive experiment

Start color: #


End color: #



Interpolation space:
Step size space:


Interpolation space:
Step size space:

References

  1. A Standard Default Color Space for the Internet - sRGB, M. Stokes, M. Anderson, S. Chandrasekar, R. Motta 1996. http://www.color.org/sRGB.xalter
  2. CIE 1931 color space, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
  3. Lab color space, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_color_space

©2023 Mats Mattsson