
In stressful times, I sometimes cope by obsessing over finding the perfect colour palette. This has not necessarily been the healthiest of habits, but over the years I’ve converged on a delightful set of hues I’m happy to colour-code my life with.
I call the palette “Glimmerized”, and I’m publishing it here partly for my own future reference, and partly to discourage myself from tweaking it forever.
Glimmerized is based on five main colours: my favourite pink and blue, a purple in between, and a complementary green and yellow. The pink-green and blue-yellow combinations are inspired by opponent process colour theory and systems like NCS; I had those in mind when I created the Owl Beamer colour theme during another colour obsession phase a while back. But I didn’t attempt to choose perfectly opposing colours, lest I be tempted into deeper rabbit holes into the colour perception literature.
Instead, I chose a handful of colours I liked — with round coordinates in the OKLCH colour space — and built curves to let me generate any number of shades and tints of each hue.
#e50088
oklch(0.6 0.25 355)
- R01
- R02
- R03
- R04
- R05
- R06
- R07
- R08
- R09
- R0a
- R0b
- R0c
- R0d
- R0e
- R0f
#8613d1
oklch(0.5 0.25 305)
- P01
- P02
- P03
- P04
- P05
- P06
- P07
- P08
- P09
- P0a
- P0b
- P0c
- P0d
- P0e
- P0f
#007aff
oklch(0.6 0.23 255)
- B01
- B02
- B03
- B04
- B05
- B06
- B07
- B08
- B09
- B0a
- B0b
- B0c
- B0d
- B0e
- B0f
#00c669
oklch(0.7 0.23 160)
- G01
- G02
- G03
- G04
- G05
- G06
- G07
- G08
- G09
- G0a
- G0b
- G0c
- G0d
- G0e
- G0f
#ffc500
oklch(0.85 0.2 90)
- Y01
- Y02
- Y03
- Y04
- Y05
- Y06
- Y07
- Y08
- Y09
- Y0a
- Y0b
- Y0c
- Y0d
- Y0e
- Y0f
Glimmerized’s greyscale has a hint of purplish-blue to it.
#0c061e
oklch(0.15 0.05 290)
- K00
- K01
- K02
- K03
- K04
- K05
- K06
- K07
- K08
- K09
- K0a
- K0b
- K0c
- K0d
- K0e
- K0f
- K10
Themes like Solarized, Dracula, and Fairyfloss taught me how nice it is to use colours you like when you spend all day looking at them. So I’m very happy to now use Glimmerized in my text editor, website, calendar, and to-do list — hopefully for a long time to come!