A Brief History of Color - From Ochre to OKLCH

Pigments and Pyramids

The earliest known intentional use of color is roughly 40,000 years old: red ochre and charcoal, ground and blown onto cave walls. Egyptians later synthesized the world's first artificial pigment - Egyptian Blue - in 2,200 BCE.

Newton's Prism (1666)

Isaac Newton split white light through a prism and proved that "white" is a mixture of every visible wavelength. He arranged seven hues into the first color wheel - and color theory as a science was born.

Goethe and the Subjective Wheel (1810)

Goethe rejected Newton's purely physical view and emphasized the psychological experience of color. He coined ideas like color temperature and complementary balance - still core to design today.

The CIE Standard (1931)

The Commission Internationale de l'Éclairage published the first standardized model of human color perception (the XYZ space), giving science and industry a common language for color.

Pixels and Profiles

The arrival of CRTs, then LCDs, then OLEDs forced the development of sRGB (1996), Display P3, and Rec.2020 - wider color gamuts that let designers push beyond the original web-safe colors.

OKLab and OKLCH (2020)

Björn Ottosson published OKLab - a perceptually uniform color space tuned for the modern era of HDR displays and gradient interpolation. CSS Color 4 made OKLCH a first-class citizen of the web.

Forty thousand years later, we are still chasing the same goal: capturing and sharing the experience of color.