Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) based visible light communication (VLC) can provide license-free bands, high data rates, and high security levels, which is a promising technique that will be extensively applied in future. Multi-band transmission color filters with enough peak transmittance and suitable bandwidth play a pivotal role for boosting signal-noise-ratio in VLC systems. In this paper, multi-band transmission color filters with bandwidth of dozens nanometers are designed by a simple analytical method. Experiment results of one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) tri-band color filters demonstrate the effectiveness of the multi-band transmission color filters and the corresponding analytical method. •Multi-band transmission filters with dozens nanometers bandwidth are proposed.•An analytic method is used to design such multi-band transmission filters.•Both 1D and 2D tri-band filters are fabricated for RGB white light LEDs, respectively.•Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed analytical method.