As a lighting engineer, I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about color. Not the “does this shirt match these pants” kind of color, but the kind where you argue with a client for three hours about whether 3000K or 3500K makes their lobby look like a cozy café or a hospital corridor. So when I saw Poline — a tool for generating “esoteric color palettes” — my first reaction was: “Finally, someone made a color picker for people who think beige is too mainstream.”

The tool (link below) appears to use some clever procedural generation to create palettes that are not your typical Adobe Color “analogous” or “triadic” schemes. It’s like giving a random walk to a color wheel and seeing where it lands. From a technical perspective, that’s interesting because it often results in combinations that are unexpected, sometimes jarring, occasionally beautiful, and frequently useless for actual lighting design — but that’s the point of “esoteric,” right?

Now, as an electrical engineer, I must confess: I don’t see color the way artists do. I see wavelengths, spectral power distributions, and CIE coordinates. When a designer shows me a palette with three shades of purple and a mustard yellow, my brain immediately asks: “What’s the CRI of that yellow? Is it achievable with RGB LEDs or do we need phosphor-converted amber?” And that’s where the fun begins.

Color perception is a tricky business. The human eye has three types of cones (roughly RGB), but the mapping from physical spectra to perceived color is not linear. That’s why we have color spaces like Lab, Luv, and the good old CIE 1931 diagram that looks like a shoe sole. Tools like Poline, if they’re smart, operate in a perceptual space rather than raw RGB, which means the palettes they generate might actually look “balanced” to the human eye even if the hex codes look like a unicorn vomited on a spreadsheet.

One thing I appreciate about such tools: they force you to step out of your comfort zone. In lighting design, we often default to white light of a certain Kelvin temperature and maybe some RGB accents. But esoteric palettes can inspire ideas for dynamic lighting scenes, architectural accents, or even UI design for control panels. The challenge is translating a screen palette into real photons. That’s where the engineer steps in: “You want this exact shade of teal? That’s 490nm dominant wavelength, 30% saturation, and we’ll need a cyan LED with a narrow band filter, plus a white LED to desaturate it. And it will cost you three times more than just using a gel.”

The tool also reminded me of an old trick: many “esoteric” palettes are just the result of applying a mathematical function (like sine waves at different frequencies) to hue, saturation, and lightness. It’s the same idea behind generative art. And that’s fine — math can be beautiful, even when it produces a color combination that would make a traffic light nervous.

Would I use Poline in my lighting projects? Probably not directly, but as a brainstorming tool, absolutely. Sometimes you need a wild idea to break the monotony of 4000K office lighting. And if nothing else, it’s a great way to annoy your client with a palette that includes “quantum violet” and “rusty pumpkin” — just to see their reaction. Then you offer them 3500K and they happily accept.

So, to the creators of Poline: nice work. You’ve made a tool for people who understand that color is both physics and emotion, and that the space between “tasteful” and “what were you thinking” is a gradient worth exploring. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go adjust a dimmer curve so that “sunset orange” doesn’t look like “traffic cone” at 50% brightness.