Ravel & Hue

Overview

Ravel & Hue mixes paint in small batches and had named its 96 colours over twenty years. The names were lovely and no help at all: nobody could tell from “Ferry Smoke” whether it was lighter than “Linen Hour”, and the old swatch card was sorted alphabetically.

The brief covered the colour fan, the tin labels, and the website, with one aim: help people choose a colour without a trip to the shop.

Approach

I measured the lightness of every colour and grouped the range into 12 hue families. Inside each family, colours sit in eight steps from darkest to lightest. The names stayed, because customers love them, but each one now carries a family and a step, printed beside it.

The fan follows the same order. Opened, it reads as a wheel; closed, its edge shows a smooth run from dark to light, so you can see where a colour sits before you look at it. The cards are rounded and unvarnished, so gloss never shifts the paint colour.

Tin labels set the family and step as the largest type, with the name underneath. On the website, the same grid becomes a filter: pick a family, slide through the eight steps, and compare two colours side by side on a neutral grey.

Result

A 96-colour fan sorted by light, not by name. Returns for “too dark” or “too light” fell in the first season, and the shop now sells the fan as a product of its own. New colours slot into an existing family and step, so the system grows without a redesign.