Lab · research instruments
Can taste be measured?
Partly. Two instruments, each built on published research and my own recorded judgements — kept as separate scores, because a design can be kind to readers and still not mine, or mine and still unkind.
Paarvai · பார்வை
A critic that shows its sources.
Paarvai renders a page in a real browser — desktop and phone, light and dark — and measures it: Hasler–Süsstrunk colourfulness, edge density as a complexity proxy, calm-surface ratio, hue families, contrast of every text node, line length, leading, type families, declared motion and whether reduced-motion is honoured. Then it scores two lenses.
This site, scored by Paarvai
Verdict: kind to readers, and unmistakably his. Measured 25/9/2026.
Seven pages critiqued; worst: an essay page 93/92 (complexity just above the strong-reference p75).
What it cannot see: imagery, copy tone, JavaScript-driven motion, anything below the first screen for pixel metrics. A high taste score is partly circular here — I built this site knowing Paarvai's rules. The honest check is you.
The evidence lens
38
principles, each graded by the strength of its evidence. 2 were downgraded as weak or failed to replicate — including the famous red/blue study, which did not survive a larger replication.
My taste, as axes
- cool ↔ warmhigh
- decorative-first ↔ accessibility-firsthigh
- ornamented ↔ restrainedhigh
- playful ↔ seriousmedium
- solid ↔ translucentlow
- static ↔ motion-richmedium
- monochrome ↔ meaningful colourhigh
- sharp ↔ roundedmedium
- one typeface ↔ serif prose, sans UIhigh
- one density ↔ density per contextmedium
never
Never use pure white or pure black as a surface/ink colour -- always a warm, slightly toned paper/ink pair.
pure white reads sterile/clinical against every other warm token; pure black has no warmth and breaks the palette's coherence.
prefer
Keep brand/identity colour and functional/semantic colour in architecturally separate layers, and let only one file own literal colour values.
so a rebrand of the identity layer (e.g. purple wordmark -> marigold) never touches meaning-bearing colour (Viyugam stays purple, alarm stays red), and drift is caught by lint rather than eyeballing.
prefer
On brand/marketing surfaces, use exactly one chromatic accent; on information-dense software, use a full meaningful semantic palette -- don't confuse the two registers.
a marketing surface needs one thing to look at; a dashboard needs colour to carry state.
never
Never rely on colour alone to signal meaning -- pair with shape, icon, or label.
accessibility (colour-blindness) and because hue-only signalling is a decoration, not a real UI contract.
prefer
Treat WCAG AA (and 7:1 for anything projected) as a hard design constraint to design INTO the token file, not an audit run after the fact.
contrast fixes made after the fact are patchy; baking the ratio into the token comment makes every future colour change self-checking.
prefer
Cut any panel, legend, or log that is either read-only-and-unread or duplicative of another queue, even if it was the 'correct' thing to build originally.
clutter has a real cost even when each individual piece is defensible; the test is whether it's actually used, not whether it's conceptually justified.
A sample of the evidence
- Score colourfulness and complexity for first-impression predictionstrong
Compute colourfulness and complexity on any candidate design and use them as the primary automatic first-impression score.
Reinecke, K. et al. (2013). 'Predicting users' first impressions of website aesthetics with a quantification of perceived visual complexity and colorfulness.' CHI 2013. n=450 websites, 548 raters.
- Default to positive polarity for sustained-reading surfacesstrong
Default text-dense, sustained-reading surfaces to light background/dark text; offer dark mode as an ambience preference layered on top, not as a legibility claim.
Piepenbrock, C., Mayr, S., Mund, I., & Buchner, A. (2013). 'Positive display polarity is advantageous for both younger and older adults.' Ergonomics, 56(7), 1116-1123.
- Honour prefers-reduced-motion unconditionallystrong
Any design that ships large-amplitude motion by default without honouring prefers-reduced-motion should be flagged as an accessibility defect, not a taste choice.
W3C WCAG 2.2, Understanding SC 2.3.3 'Animation from Interactions.'
- Constrain body-text measure to roughly 55-75 characters per linemoderate
Constrain the measure of body text to ~55-75 characters per line for perceived ease, even though longer lines are not objectively slower to read.
Dyson, M.C. & Haselgrove, M. (2001); Dyson, M.C. & Kipping, G.J. (1998). Reviewed in 'Optimal Line Length in Reading -- A Literature Review.'
- Score whitespace ratio as a luxury/quality lever, without invented percentagesstrong
Increasing whitespace ratio around a focal element is a real, recently-confirmed lever on perceived quality; report it directionally, never with a specific unverified percentage.
Iseki, M. et al. (2025). 'Perception of Luxury and Product Quality in Package Design: Examining the Effects of White Space, Typeface, and Visual Texture.' Journal of Sensory Studies. n=1193, 2x2x2 design.
- Use rasa as the engine's top-level mood ontologynot empirical
Replace an open-ended, vague 'vibe' vocabulary with a small closed set of named rasa-like registers, each bound to a concrete bundle of colour/contrast/motion/whitespace parameters.
Bharata Muni, Natya Shastra; ninth rasa (shanta) added by Abhinavagupta, 10th century CE.
Oli · ஒலி
A room that tunes itself to a mood.
Built on the valence–arousal circumplex. Tempo carries arousal, scale carries valence, and the two are kept apart. Steady sound for focus, because changing-state sound is the strongest distractor in the research. No speech, ever. Loudness held between −23 and −27 LUFS — every mood checked with an EBU R128 meter before it ships.
Calm focus
Yaman-like, 62 bpm, 30% silence, pink air
Deep work
modal drone, 70 bpm, brown air
Wonder
Marwa-like, bell voice, 5 s room
Warm
Bhoopali-like, pluck, 74 bpm
Playful
Desh-like, pulsed, 112 bpm
Reflective
Bhairavi-like, 40% silence
Energised
132 bpm, dense, short room
Dusk
Kafi-like, bittersweet
Night
Malkauns-like, 50 bpm, 6.5 s room
Raga names are melodic inspiration, not emotion claims — the research does not support a fixed raga-to-mood mapping, and the time-of-day (samay) default is labelled as tradition, not evidence.