Subset Statistics

Basic, Essential and Full are three sizes of one library. This page is the evidence for what each of them is worth.

What the sets are

Where they came from is on How This Library Was Made.

They nest — Basic inside Essential inside Full — and they exist for practicality. Four thousand swatches is a specification, not something anyone browses, and not something you want in a fan deck or a Swatches panel.

Two rules govern membership. Each set is a fixed selection, made once. And every colour in Basic and Essential carries a plain English name, because these are the sets people browse and quote.

How close is the nearest one?

The useful measure of a subset is not how its own members are spaced. It is how far any colour in the library sits from the nearest member — the question you are actually asking when you browse it.

ΔE₀₀, M2 / D50 / 2°. † Full has no set above it, so its column is the distance to the nearest other sample.

Read the 95% column. Nineteen colours in twenty are within 4.01 of an Essential member and within 6.01 of a Basic one. The worst case is one stubborn region, and it has a cause — below.

The library’s own spacing

Full is built to a band: no two samples closer than 1.5 ΔE₀₀, none further than 4.0 from its nearest neighbour. The average is 2.52. The neutral ramp steps at 1.90 to 2.00, which is a useful thing to hold in your head — that is what “just visibly different” looks like.

For scale at the other end: 0.03 is roughly what you get re-reading the same patch without moving the instrument. Anything smaller than that is not a difference.

Balance across the hue families

A smaller set is only honest if it is smaller everywhere. Share of each family, against Full:

Neutrals are deliberately over-represented in Basic: nine of them in 500, because a grey ramp is worth more in a small palette than its share of the space would suggest.

What limits the sets

Members are chosen by farthest-point selection — each addition is the eligible colour furthest from everything already in the set, so the emptiest region is filled first. With the whole library eligible, Essential at 2000 would reach a worst gap of 4.50. Restricted to colours that carry a name, it reaches 5.39.

That difference is history, not method. The sets were selected while only named colours were eligible, and the colours furthest from Essential were the unnamed ones. Naming finished on 27 August 2026 — all 4253 carry a name now — so the restriction is gone, and the 0.89 between 5.39 and 4.50 is what a reselection would recover. The published membership stays as it is until there is a reason to change it.