Color analysis

The 12 color seasons

Four families, three variants each. Every type is a position on three axes — hue, value and chroma — which is also what the questionnaire scores, so a result can be traced back to the axis that moved it.

All twelve in-depth pages are published. Each was written one at a time rather than generated in a batch — this category rewards depth, not page count.

The same type under two names

Eight of the twelve types are commonly known by two names. These are labels from different schools for the same position on the three axes, not different types, so this site keeps one page per type and lists both names on it.

Twelve types, or sixteen?

This site uses twelve. So do the two most-read references in the field: as of 31 August 2026, theconceptwardrobe and 12 Blueprints both publish twelve types, and both use the same twelve names — Bright, True and Light Spring; Light, True and Soft Summer; Soft, True and Dark Autumn; Bright, True and Dark Winter.

Sixteen-type systems also exist, but there is no single sixteen-type system. They disagree with each other about the structure and about the names, and at least one large site uses different sixteen-name lists on different pages of its own site. So a sixteen-type result is not simply a twelve-type result with more precision — it depends entirely on who gave it to you.

The sixteen-type scheme with a documented originator is ByFERIAL's 4x4, published in 2015. It keeps the four seasons and adds four modifiers — Pure, Tinted, Toned and Shaded — so its types are Pure Summer, Tinted Summer, Toned Summer, Shaded Summer, and the same four across the other three seasons. That is a different structure, not a renaming of the twelve, and it does not map cleanly onto this site.

Other sixteen-type sites reuse the twelve-type vocabulary and add names such as Deep Summer, Bright Summer, Light Autumn, Clear Autumn and Soft Winter. If you have been given one of those, the table below is where it lands here. The rows marked alias are simply two names for one type. The rows marked closest fit are our reading of where that name sits on the three axes — none of those systems publishes a correspondence, so treat it as a starting point and read the type page before you trust it.

Reading the three axes

Every page on this site describes a type as three values, and every value is a band on a measurable scale rather than an impression.

Sources

Claims on this page that are not our own judgment are listed here with where they come from. Where we could not find a source, that is stated too rather than smoothed over.

1. The twelve type names, and the fact that the two most-read references both use twelve.Read on 31 August 2026 from theconceptwardrobe's Complete Seasonal Guides index and from 12blueprints.com's own product titles. Both list Bright / True / Light Spring, Light / True / Soft Summer, Soft / True / Dark Autumn, Bright / True / Dark Winter. Note that both use “Dark Winter” and “Dark Autumn”; this site uses Deep Winter and Deep Autumn as the primary names and carries the Dark forms as aliases.
2. The 4x4 sixteen-season system and its Pure / Tinted / Toned / Shaded modifiers.ByFERIAL Image & Color Institute, “4x4 Color Analysis (16 Seasons)”, announced January 2015 — byferial.com. The site describes the structure and names the four Summer types but does not print all sixteen names, so we do not list them.
3. That sixteen-type naming is not consistent between sites.Checked on 31 August 2026 on palettehunt.com, whose sixteen-season article, palette index and comparison matrix each use a different set of names — the article lists both “Bright Spring” and “Clear Spring” and omits Bright Winter, while other pages on the same site use True Summer, True Winter and Dark Autumn. This is the basis for the statement that a sixteen-type label depends on who issued it.
4. That personal color analysis as individual palettes predates the seasonal systems.Guide to the Suzanne Caygill Papers, 1930–1990, Collection 6367, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library —finding aid. Caygill (1911–1994) worked on individual client color palettes from about 1940; the container list includes Academy of Color materials titled “The Four Seasons: Feminine Types” and “The Four Seasons: Masculine Types”. Her book is Suzanne Caygill, Color: The Essence of You, Celestial Arts, 1980, ISBN 0-89087-195-7.
5. That the four-season version reached a mass audience in 1980.Carole Jackson, Color Me Beautiful, Washington DC: Acropolis Books, 1980, ISBN 0-87491-281-4, LCCN 79-028456 —Open Library record.
6. That the idea of a personal palette tied to one's own coloring predates all of it — and that it is not Johannes Itten's seasonal system.Johannes Itten, The Elements of Color, ed. Faber Birren, trans. Ernst van Haagen, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970, ISBN 0-442-24038-4, “Subjective Timbre”, p. 24. Itten describes color preference by physical type there, but he does not assign people to seasons — the four-season exercises in The Art of Color are about color harmony, not personal typing. Attributing seasonal color analysis to Itten is a later back-attribution, so we do not make it.
7. The attribution of the twelve-type split to Kathryn Kalisz's Sci\ART system — flagged, not asserted.Reported consistently across independent practitioner sites (chrysaliscolour.com, truecolour.com.au, chromology.co.uk). As of 31 August 2026 we found no library catalog record, obituary of record, academic citation or USPTO registration for Sci\ART or the “Twelve-Tone Color System”. Widely reported, not independently documented.
8. That hue, value and chroma are the Munsell attributes.Albert H. Munsell, A Color Notation, 2nd edn, Boston: Geo. H. Ellis Co., 1907, title page —full text. Value maps to lightness and chroma to saturation per K. L. Kelly and D. B. Judd, Color: Universal Language and Dictionary of Names, NBS Special Publication 440, National Bureau of Standards, 1976, pp. 5 and 32.