RAL

The RAL series consists of standard colors of the Reichsausschuss für Lieferbedingungen (Committee for Delivery Conditions) for the military, industry and the German state, painted on aluminum panels. Each RAL color was created for a specific purpose. In the series, they are combined into color groups accordingly. Depen­ding on the ambient light, the paint colors change their color impression.

Some of the colors still in use today date back to the times of the First and Second World Wars. Their history of use is mostly unexplored. For this series, color shades deleted from the collection after 1945 were recon­structed using original color samples: Dark yellow, for example, was introduced in 1943 as a camouflage shade against newly developed infrared night-vision devices; light blue camouflaged fighter planes against the sky. Black gray, however, RAL 7021, also known as tank gray, has survived the times in the color collection with mini­mal changes.