Design Nomenclature / Color
Munsell system
Also called Munsell, Munsell color order system
Albert Munsell's 1905 ordering of color by hue, value, and chroma, notated as 5R 4/14. The achievement was perceptual spacing settled by eye and then by measurement: one step of value should look like one step anywhere in the solid, which is exactly why the solid comes out lumpy rather than a tidy sphere.
In practice
Still the vocabulary sitting underneath the words 'value' and 'chroma'. Standard in soil science, dentistry, and paint matching long after designers moved to numeric spaces.
Not to be confused with
- NCSThe Swedish standard, built on Hering's opponent theory rather than on measurement: a color is described by how much it resembles the six elementary percepts — white, black, yellow, red, blue, green. S 1050-Y90R reads as 10% blackness, 50% chromaticness, a yellow leaning ninety percent of the way to red.
- CIELABA device-independent opponent space — L* for lightness, a* green to red, b* blue to yellow — built so equal numeric distances approximate equal perceived differences. Its polar form, LCh, restates a* and b* as chroma and hue angle. Both inherit a documented flaw: the blue region bends, so hue drifts along a ramp that should hold it.