I made an elm port of HSLuv color space here:
If you don’t know what HSLuv is, you should lear about it 
. It allows adjustment over color in a perceptually linear space.
This means you can have dynamic colors with same perceptual saturation or lightness. If you go on the http://www.hsluv.org/ website, you can play with the hue, saturation and lightness sliders and see how they work together.
As a “non designer”, HSLuv color space have been incredibly useful to me (and other perceptual color spaces before it).