About
About Intrinsic Designs
Intrinsic Designs is a notebook about interior colour and materials, written for people who have to choose a paint, a stone and a timber and then live with all three for the next decade.
The strip above is the palette of the site itself, five colours spanning 99 LRV points. Colour squares appear here as content rather than ornament, because a hex code printed under a solid block of that exact colour carries more information than a photograph of a painted wall taken under unknown light.
| Hex | LRV | Role on Intrinsic Designs |
|---|---|---|
| #FFFFFF | 100 | page background behind every article |
| #F0EDE6 | 85 | warm paper tone, also the field colour in the palette article |
| #E2E2DF | 76 | rules under the masthead and inside every table |
| #767672 | 18 | labels, meta lines, captions and navigation |
| #101010 | 1 | body text, headings and table head rules |
Method
How are the colour notes on Intrinsic Designs produced?
Intrinsic Designs works from physical samples, not screen renderings. Paint goes onto A2 primed card, 42.0 cm by 59.4 cm, at two full coats with 4 hours between coats, cures for 24 hours before any judgement, and gets viewed at 09:00, 13:00, 16:00 and after dark under 2700K lamps.
Stone and timber samples are viewed flat and vertical, dry and sealed. A horizontal sample collects 7500K sky light across its whole face and reads 5 to 8 LRV points lighter than the same material stood vertical, and a sealed stone darkens by up to 12 LRV points against its dry offcut.
Comparison photographs are taken with exposure and white balance locked. Automatic white balance corrects the exact colour temperature shift a note exists to record, so an auto sequence across four hours produces four identical looking frames and no usable evidence.
Numbers
What do the hex codes and LRV figures on Intrinsic Designs mean?
Every LRV figure on Intrinsic Designs is computed from the sRGB hex value using the CIE relative luminance weights 0.2126 red, 0.7152 green and 0.0722 blue, applied after gamma expansion, then scaled to 0 to 100. A spectrophotometer reading from a cured paint film commonly differs by 2 to 4 points.
Hex codes on Intrinsic Designs are approximations of physical paints and materials, chosen so a reader can reproduce roughly the same relationships on screen. No display renders a matt paint film accurately and no two displays agree, so treat every hex value as the starting point for a physical sample rather than as a specification.
Where a computed LRV and a manufacturer LRV disagree, the manufacturer figure wins, because a spectrophotometer measures the cured film and the sRGB calculation measures a screen approximation of it. Paint brand names and product codes are deliberately absent from every article, since a brand LRV that has not been measured cannot be quoted honestly.
Room dimensions, surface areas and percentages in the articles are worked examples, not measurements taken from a specific property. The 4 m by 5 m sitting room with a 2.6 m ceiling used in the palette article is a calculation set, so substitute real dimensions before applying any proportion.
Contact
How do I send a correction to Intrinsic Designs?
Intrinsic Designs accepts corrections on manufacturer LRV figures, on sealed stone behaviour and on daylight colour temperature readings. A correction needs four items: the material and finish, the measured or published figure, the light source in Kelvin, and the time of day. Each accepted correction is published with the source named.
Corrections on sealed stone carry the most weight, because the 8 to 12 point limestone drop and the 6 to 10 point travertine drop quoted in the material article are ranges observed on offcuts rather than published data. A reading from a named quarry and a named sealer replaces a range with a figure.