A method of generating a design pattern for a spatial radiation modulator to encode two or more selected spectral components in one or more spectral ranges for the chemometric analysis of a group of analytes. The method includes obtaining a corresponding spectrum for each of the analytes, defining a set of initial spectral windows, constructing a chemometric matrix to relate concentrations of the analytes to intensities of the spectral components, deriving optimized spectral windows, and translating the center wavelength and the bandwidth of each of the optimized spectral windows into a corresponding optimized annular region on the modulator.