About PIGMENTUM

PIGMENTUM is a color reference platform built around a single idea: every color deserves a name. All 16,777,216 colors a screen can display are catalogued here, each with its own unique name, values in twelve color formats, and a growing set of tools and explorations that go far beyond a simple color picker.

What this project is

Most color tools treat color as a number — a hex code, an RGB triplet, a slider value. That is useful for machines, but not how people actually remember or talk about color. We recall the amber of street lights on wet cobblestones, the particular grey of morning fog, the blue a monitor glows at 3 a.m. PIGMENTUM tries to bridge that gap by giving every single RGB color a name and a dedicated page, so a color is no longer just a code but something you can find, recognise, and return to.

The catalogue covers the full 24-bit RGB space: 256 levels each of red, green, and blue — exactly 16,777,216 combinations. Each color's page shows its name, its hex value, and representations in RGB, RGB%, HSL, HSV, CMYK, LAB, LCH, sRGB, 8-digit hex with alpha, the matching CSS color name (where one exists), and the internal decimal identifier.

How a color gets its name

Names are generated by a deterministic algorithm — a bijective Feistel cipher across all 16.7 million positions — so every color always receives the same unique name, with zero collisions across the entire space. The vocabulary draws on the color's hue, saturation, and lightness, combined with an evocative word list so that neighbouring shades read as distinct rather than blurring into near-identical labels. The aim is not a technical description but a memorable handle: something closer to how a painter or a poet might point at a shade.

Because the names are fixed and permanent, they work as stable references. Bookmark a color today and the same name and page will be there a year from now.

The color tools

Beyond the catalogue, PIGMENTUM offers a growing set of free tools that run entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded; all calculations happen on your device.

Design & working tools

Science & data tools

History, culture & reference

Who uses it

The site is built for anyone who works with or is curious about color: designers hunting for a precise shade, developers checking a contrast ratio or looking up a hex code, photographers naming tones in an image, scientists interested in color perception, students studying color theory, teachers looking for visual aids, and people who simply enjoy exploring color for its own sake. There is no account to create and no paywall — the catalogue, the Color of the Day, and all tools are open to everyone.

The naming system

Standard color naming systems — Pantone, RAL, Munsell — cover at most a few thousand colors and require proprietary licensing to use. PIGMENTUM takes a different approach: every one of the 16,777,216 RGB colors gets a unique name, generated by a deterministic bijective algorithm so that each color always has exactly one name and each name belongs to exactly one color.

The algorithm uses a Feistel cipher permutation across a vocabulary of 374 million possible name combinations, structured into four position-based slots and drawn from HSL-disjoint word lists. Names are not random — they are distributed so that colors with similar visual properties tend to receive names from similar vocabulary pools, making the naming feel semantically coherent even though it is entirely algorithmic.

The result is a stable, permanent naming layer for the entire visible RGB spectrum: bookmark a color today and its name and URL will not change. This stability is a deliberate design choice — useful for color reference work, reproducible in code, and memorable for human communication.

Color science and tools

Beyond naming and cataloguing, PIGMENTUM provides data that most color tools do not. Every color page shows the color's relationship to the Munsell scale, its nearest Pantone equivalent (from a library of 200+ standard colors), a metamerism index indicating how stable the color appears under different lighting conditions, and a mood/season/temperature characterization derived from perceptual color science.

The science tools go further: the periodic table tool maps every element to its characteristic emission spectrum color; the mineral atlas covers 68 minerals; the protein structure visualizer translates amino acid sequences into color; and the chaos attractor tool renders mathematical attractors as color fields. These tools exist because color does not belong only to design — it is the output of physics, chemistry, and biology.

Languages

PIGMENTUM is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Use the language toggle in the footer to switch. The crawlable content (color names, URLs, page structure) always stays in English for search engines; the language toggle is a client-side overlay for human visitors.

Accuracy and technical notes

All numeric color values — hex, RGB, HSL, CMYK, LAB, LCH, and the rest — are computed mathematically from the color's RGB values and are exact within the precision of the underlying model. CMYK values are approximate conversions (there is no single universal RGB→CMYK formula — printing results depend on the specific ink set and substrate). LAB and LCH values use the D65 standard illuminant and the sRGB color profile, which is the standard for web content.

The "nearest Pantone" shown on each color page is the closest match within PIGMENTUM's reference library using ΔE color distance in LAB space — it is a closest approximation, not a guaranteed Pantone specification. For print production work, always verify against physical Pantone swatches under appropriate lighting.

How the site is run

PIGMENTUM is an independent project, not backed by a company or investor. It is built and maintained by a single person in Germany and funded through unobtrusive advertising, which keeps the catalogue and all tools free to use. The project is operated in accordance with German law; full operator details are in the imprint, and how data is handled is described in the privacy policy.