RAL Effect

RAL Effect holds 490 colours: 420 solid shades and 70 metallics. The collection appeared in 2007 as the first RAL collection based on water-borne paint systems, free of lead, cadmium and chromates.

Effect is not an addition to RAL Classic, nor a variant of RAL Design. It is a collection in its own right with its own ordering — and that ordering is the reason to work with it.

The family is the unit

Where Classic is a collection of separate colours and Design a systematic grid, Effect is built out of families. Each family consists of six solid colours and one metallic tuned to them.

That is exactly what you need when a product is made of several materials. A coated panel, an extruded profile and a plastic part all behave differently; by staying within one family they read as a single whole rather than as three attempts at the same colour.

How to read the code

Three digits give the family, and the character after the hyphen the position within it. RAL 320-4 is the fourth colour of family 320; RAL 320-M is the metallic of that same family.

The families are arranged in eight series. Series 100 to 700 each contain nine families, from x10 to x90; series 800 runs up to 870.

Effect colours have no colour name, only a code. That is a deliberate choice: where a name calls up associations that differ from language to language, a code does not.

Judging a metallic

The seventy metallics behave differently from the solid shades. Their appearance depends on the viewing angle, the film thickness and the application method. A screen cannot in principle reproduce that effect, and a flat sample only partly.

So always judge a metallic at varying angles and, where it matters, on a sample in the final finish. The metallic is moreover meant to be used alongside the six solid colours of its family, not as a replacement for one of them.

Reference material

RAL E1 contains all 490 colours as primary standards: binding colour samples for colour approval and quality control. For choosing and presenting colours there are the RAL E3 fan deck with all 490 colours, the RAL E4 fan deck with only the seventy metallics, and loose colour samples in A6 format (RAL E6).