Art · the idea

The idea behind every color.

Rhapsody starts from how human eyes actually experience color — not how machines happen to store it. That perceptual foundation is called ART: three honest dimensions, a ring of 72 named anchor hues, and a belief that color belongs to everyone.

ART · the model

A color model built for human eyes.

Rhapsody describes every color in three honest, perceptual dimensions — so the math finally lines up with what you actually see.

A

Anchor

Hue, placed on a perceptually even ring of 72 anchors — so a step is a step, all the way around the wheel.

R

Ratio

Chroma as a normalized ratio, not a raw magnitude — vividness you can dial without washing out or muddying.

T

Tone

A clean black-to-white tone axis that behaves like mixing paint, not like fighting a slider.

The named ring

Seventy-two colors, from around the world.

The 72 anchors aren’t just coordinates — each carries a name drawn from languages and cultures across the world, a small way to honor that color belongs to everyone.

An alphabet of color.

Look closely and you’ll find a quiet detail: every letter, A to Z, has a color. Quince, Xanadu and Zreq weren’t accidents.

Why seventy-two?

It divides cleanly more ways than almost any number its size — into 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 18, 24 — and it gives green the room to breathe that sixty couldn’t.

All 72

The full spectrum.

Names like Zreq (Moroccan blue) and Kikorangi (Māori for sky-blue) restore credit to the cultures they came from. More of these stories are on the way.

The bigger idea

A universal language for color.

Text once had the same problem color has now: every system stored it differently, and meaning was lost in translation — until Unicode gave every character one stable identity that any system could share.

Color is overdue for the same thing. As it moves between wider-gamut displays, HDR, streaming, print and AI-generated content, the inconsistencies compound — and today they’re still caught by people eyeballing proofs on different screens.

ART is that shared identity for color — a meaning-preserving layer that travels across formats, platforms and time. Palette is the first tool built on it. It won’t be the last.

That’s the art. The proof that it works — measured across millions of colors — is the science.

See the science →

Find your color’s name.

Drop a brand color into Palette and see where it lands on the ring — and the whole system it unlocks.

Open Palette in Figma → The story behind Rhapsody