About

Not a database.
A point of view.

Colour Memory started as a personal archive of Oxfordshire place names and ended up as something much stranger: a colour intelligence layer for AI.

The story

Built to answer questions
no other API could.

The API that makes your AI the most interesting in the room.

The archive grew from a simple observation: every colour database in existence treated colour as a value. A hex code. A Lab coordinate. None of them treated it as a fact -- something that happened at a specific time, to a specific person, with a documented consequence.

So the archive was built differently. RAL Classic. BS 4800. Munsell. Australian AS 2700. Shakespeare. Keats. Japan. Netherlands. Islamic geometric tradition and manuscript illumination. A deep pigment chemistry record spanning Cennini (c.1390) through Church (1890) -- with preparation methods, substrate warnings, toxicity documentation, and artist associations. Turner. Rembrandt. Reynolds. Titian.

Most colour systems are built from datasets. This one was built from the understanding that colour is never just a value. It is always also a material, a history, and a context.

The matching engine returns nearest neighbours in milliseconds. The /mix endpoint checks pigment compatibility against documented warnings from historical trade manuals -- send Verdigris and White Lead in oil, and receive Cennini's 1390 guild warning that they are "mortal enemies in everything." The Resonance Index maps Cross-archive resonance connections: where Bledington Corn resonates with Maturing Sun in Keats' To Autumn, and Prussian Blue connects the Dutch Golden Age archive, the pigment chemistry archive, and three literary archives simultaneously. The MCP server at /mcp means any AI agent can query all of it natively.

UK Trade Mark UK00004387450. Classes 9, 35, and 42. Accepted May 2026.

Digby Oldridge
Founder · PR Eye Ltd · Oxfordshire
A degree in Politics and History. Two decades calibrating colour across light sources, substrates, and print processes. That combination -- the study of how power, culture and time shape systems, combined with a professional lifetime reading colour in the physical world -- is precisely what the archive required. Most colour databases are built by engineers. This one was built by someone who had to know what colour actually does.
GitHub Email
Verified
Every entry sourced
Global
Cultural archives
Deep
Pigment chemistry
Resonance
Cross-archive index
Intellectual property

Colour Memory is
a registered trademark.

The trademark was accepted by the UK Intellectual Property Office in May 2026, covering the use of the Colour Memory mark in software, data services, and professional advisory.

Mark
COLOUR MEMORY
Number
UK00004387450
Classes
9, 35, 42
Accepted
May 2026
Press

For press enquiries

“Colour Memory is the kind of project that makes you realise how much a name for a colour actually knows — and how little a hex code tells you.”
Available for press comment — contact below
“The archive returns not just a colour match but a biography: provenance, material integrity, regulatory flags, and physics. That is a different proposition from any colour search engine in existence.”
Digby Oldridge, founder

For press enquiries, interview requests, or product demonstrations, contact Digby Oldridge directly. High-resolution assets, API access for editorial testing, and background on the archive methodology are all available on request.

Press contact