
The Müller Formula or Predictable Color Preferences (2007) - pmcpinto
http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/09/02/the-muller-formula-or-predictable-color-preferences
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jacobolus
I’m pretty sure I made a comment about this or a similar post linked here a
few years ago, including some graphics cooked up in Photoshop explaining the
problems with the examples, but I can’t find it at the moment, and can’t be
bothered to make new demonstrations.

Suffice it to say: unfortunately the lightness (a.k.a. value) of the color
stripes varies tremendously from one example to the other in this post, which
makes this a basically worthless comparison, as in general lightness contrast
dominates other visual effects. If you swapped the lightness (e.g. in CIELAB
or CIECAM02 color space) from the left and right examples while leaving the
hue/chroma the same, you’d get the opposite results inre what looks “good”,
which would reveal this “Müller formula” to be bogus (or at any rate radically
oversimplified).

More generally, I’ve never seen a convincing exposition of similar color
preference effects backed by data collected in a scientific paper with
reasonable study design. It’s always handwavey 19th century nonsense,
sometimes with a handful of preferences expressed by a tiny sample of
homogenous survey respondents tacked on the end. Bad examples are endemic to
the pseudosciency-color-theory genre, because most people work with terrible
color models which are only marginally relevant to human perception.

The key to making color schemes for graphic illustrations or data
visualizations look good is to use enough contrast (especially lightness
contrast) between intentionally separate shapes so that distinct elements
don’t accidentally blend together. (Note that sometimes you want certain
elements to have lower contrast, but that should be an intentional choice,
made for some obvious reason.)

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jacobolus
Found it:

[http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/ycnews/nonsense.png](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/ycnews/nonsense.png)

[http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/ycnews/nonsense2.png](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/ycnews/nonsense2.png)

[http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/ycnews/nonsense3.png](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/ycnews/nonsense3.png)

Also, past discussions of this same example (apparently at different sites?):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156683)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=618881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=618881)
(this one includes discussion context for the images linked above)

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Hermel
Looking at nonsense.png actually supports the Müller formula. At least to me,
the best-looking combinations are exactly the two that should be the best-
looking according to the Müller formula. The version you created have color
and brightness values that move counter the "natural brightness", and look
uglier than the originals, just as the Müller formula predicts.

~~~
jacobolus
You missed my point, which was that the example was supposed to show how
changes in hue affected whether something would look good, but the example
showed dramatically varying lightness and chroma, in addition to the hue
differences, thus making the comparison useless as a demonstration of the
claimed effect. To make an example showing what the author of these examples
wants to show, it would be necessary to keep lightness and chroma consistent
from one set of color combinations to another, so that viewers can see the hue
differences instead of being distracted by lightness/chroma differences.

If the “Müller formula” worked the way the author of these example images
thought, then the color combinations at the right side after my lightness
switcharound should _still_ be “good looking”, but to me at least, with low
lightness contrast, they instead start to look very muddy. Likewise, in my
opinion the color combinations at the left of each example are improved
dramatically by the increase in lightness contrast, even though they still
have low chroma contrast and aren’t exactly my favorites.

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myrryr
There is no actual Muller formula though. Though, I can see how you would
build a color scale creator using the idea. I will see how it works with our
data visualizations, and if so, d3 now has modules, I can build something for
that.

Currently we use I Want Hue ([http://tools.medialab.sciences-
po.fr/iwanthue/](http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/)) which works
far better then it should :).

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snodnipper
I'd love to see a follow-up article on how material design colors were
created. Tools such as [http://mcg.mbitson.com/](http://mcg.mbitson.com/) seem
to produce uglier colors, imo.

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jibbit
Sadly I couldn't make it past the advertising.

