Color Guides
Practical color for real products — contrast, file formats, and designing for every kind of vision.
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Color decisions feel subjective right up until they meet the real world: a label nobody can read in sunlight, a palette that won’t import into the next tool, a chart where two lines look identical to one in twelve men. These guides cover the parts of color work that have actual answers — what the numbers mean, how the formats behave, and how to design for the vision people really have.
Start here
- WCAG contrast ratios — what the 4.5:1 and 3:1 thresholds actually measure, and how to pick combinations that pass AA and AAA.
- Palette file formats — ASE, GPL, CSS variables, JSON, and friends: which tools read each one, and how to move palettes without retyping hex codes.
- Designing for color-vision deficiency — how the main types of color blindness change what users see, and the design habits that keep interfaces usable for everyone.
Why treat color as a workflow
A palette isn’t finished when it looks good on one screen. It still has to pass contrast checks, survive a trip into your design tool and your codebase, and stay readable for users who don’t see hue the way you do. Working through those steps in order — capture, check, export — is what turns a collection of nice colors into a production asset.
That capture-check-export loop is exactly what Palette Library is built around: it grabs colors from photos, your camera, or any webpage, runs WCAG contrast checks and color-blindness previews on the spot, and exports to CSS, JSON, ASE, CSV, PNG, JPEG, and GPL when the palette is ready to ship.