DB8 has been ready for several years by now, but I never got around to publish it. Since it's included in the (upcoming) V1.4 update of the GrafX2 Toolbox...why not do it now?

With well balanced 16 & 32 color palettes done, it felt natural to expand the set with the 8 color one. Now, an 8 color palette might be of limited usefulness and more of a curiosity, but there's still things that makes it quite interesting:

• We're approaching the limit where it makes sense to deal with hues and ramps across the whole spectrum (= a challenge!).
  


• There's so few colors that we can create diagrams and map full sets of combinations that would become too complex with larger palettes.


• It can serve as an easy to understand example of the fundamentals of palette design.

I gotta admit there wasn't too much magic required to pick out the general colors, it kinda builds itself (that's probably why there's several nice 8 color palettes out there, not very different from this one). You need black and something close white, gotta have yellow and that would naturally be the 2nd brightest color. I wanted a red, green and blue to cover the spectrum. A gray would be nice and it would be suitable as halfshade for the green. Now we need a dark color for the last spot...violet is the natural choice as it shades both blue and red. Adjust the brightness levels, balance the ramps and a little bit of tweaking and we're done! (well, something like that ;))

Quickchart:


Mockup test (violently borrowing from Dan Malone :D, all drawn from scratch though!)


Properties:


Colorschemes:


Analyzis:


Files:
PAL file (.pal)

Wonderful! I'm equally impressed by the palette, as by the applications and examples you've given! Also it is interesting, perhaps unsurprising, to see that it has a very similar aesthetic or style as db16 and 32.

@snv: DB litterally gave an image with examples of human portraits in 30 different color combinations with this palette!


By the way, speaking of the dithering, I hardly noticed the dithering until I zoomed in. Dithering became a bit irrelevant when lcd screens first came out.. but now that resolutions are increasing, will it find back its purpose?

Oh, they just indicate the primary/best schemes with the most balanced ramps.

Also those mock ups...

Thanks for clearing that up, I never knew why dithered pattern scrolling had that effect!