Human Palette palette

The named mid-range tier: the 11 Berlin & Kay basic colour terms, their light/dark relatives, and the T (Teal, blue-green) and M (Magenta, purple-red) between-hue variations, anchored on the Tartan Dictionary fine grid. ref is the level-ring-hue code. Generated by cmd/namedpalette; see research/colour-human-palette.

Print it: the Human Palette shade card (PDF) — every shade as a 24 mm swatch with its code, name and the reference values to dye against.

The human palette is the named mid-tier — the colours a weaver or buyer actually names: the eleven Berlin & Kay basic terms, their light and dark relatives, and the few between-hue names (teal, magenta) the cloth needs. Like the six base roles it is a fixed palette: the six-colour Pattern already discriminates the corpus' designs remarkably well, so the named tier extends that power by one step, not by inventing a name for every dye. A named shade is a range, not a point — like the colour-naming systems that map a whole region of space to one word, each name stands for every dye that reads as that colour, and the swatch is just its centre.

The shades between — filling the space

Between the named anchors the space is continuous, and we fill it with indicative shades so the palette flows smoothly across the whole printable gamut rather than jumping between a handful of points. These are spaced evenly on the fine grid, holding the named shades fixed and relaxing the rest into the gaps (the algorithm is written up with the generated shades in the project notes).

They are a finer ruler, not new names. A colour you pick on the jog wheels still reads as its nearest named anchor — you get B, never an indicative in-between. Their work is discrimination: when a single sett carries two blues a hair apart, the fill is fine enough to tell they are genuinely distinct — yet the sett still labels them compactly, the nearer the canonical blue keeping the bare B and the next taking a roman tone, Bi (then Bii…). So the named palette stays small and fixed, the space flows, and a sett never has to invent a colour name to carry a second shade of one role.

And plotted over the fine grid in three illuminance layers — light, mid and dark. Each wheel is one lightness layer plotted in OKLab's own dimensions: the angle is hue — red at the top, then clockwise through orange and brown, yellow, green, blue and purple, the wheel's jog order — and the radius is chroma, with rings every 0.05. The faint grey dots are the fine grid at that lightness; the red dashed line is the dyeable limit. Hover a dot for its code, name and hex.

The shades

Each shade in OKLCh — lightness L, chroma C and hue h (degrees). The small number under each is that axis's fine-grid index: the lattice level, chroma ring and snapped hue angle that together make the shade's grid code.