#ActuallyAutistic web dev. Does front of the front-end. Loves perf and minimalism. Prefers HTML, CSS, Web Standards over JS, UX over DX. Hates div disease.
This is one area where it is also good to draw inspiration from the past. For example, Commodore 64 has a great palette in how it has luminance sorted out. You have 16 colors. In there you have white and black. The rest 14 colors are in luminance pairs so you have 9 levels of different luminance when adding in black and white. Since there are only 16 colors in total and two colors of similar luminance seem too close to each other you often end up pairing colors that have a different level of luminance.
I think this is a very powerful way to make an accessible palette for a website as well: purposefully limit the luminance to a few distinct values and then apply hue and saturation to guarantee you have colors that are easy to distinguish of each other.
The luminance pairs also allowed people to code "impossible colors" for C64. How? Well, on each screen render you'd make your code swap between two colors that were exact or close pairings in luminance. If the colors were too far apart then you'd see it flickering, but with close luminance pairs you couldn't tell and instead perceived "an impossible color".
This is one area where it is also good to draw inspiration from the past. For example, Commodore 64 has a great palette in how it has luminance sorted out. You have 16 colors. In there you have white and black. The rest 14 colors are in luminance pairs so you have 9 levels of different luminance when adding in black and white. Since there are only 16 colors in total and two colors of similar luminance seem too close to each other you often end up pairing colors that have a different level of luminance.
I think this is a very powerful way to make an accessible palette for a website as well: purposefully limit the luminance to a few distinct values and then apply hue and saturation to guarantee you have colors that are easy to distinguish of each other.
The luminance pairs also allowed people to code "impossible colors" for C64. How? Well, on each screen render you'd make your code swap between two colors that were exact or close pairings in luminance. If the colors were too far apart then you'd see it flickering, but with close luminance pairs you couldn't tell and instead perceived "an impossible color".
Wow! That is amazing 🤯