Pretty colors aren’t good enough
Pretty colors aren’t good enough
Pretty colors aren’t good enough
Jun 15, 2024
Equitable design patterns
Color needs to do the hard work of balancing brand voice with utility and accessibility. Fortunately there's color tooling to help designers with the complexity of managing contrast across multiple colors, tints and shades. A valuable color tool should allow you to do a couple of things:
Seed your palette with brand colors
Provide sufficient tints and shades with documented accessibility contrast
Generate output that can be leveraged by design and engineering team members
Genome Color Tool
The Genome Color web app allows you to create custom color scales from brand colors by leveraging recommended tints/shades from proven color systems. The thinking behind the tool is so smart it makes my head spin and the video tutorial provided makes it super easy to use.
Leonardo
by Nate Baldwin
Leonardo is a web app that allows you to build out multiple color ramps for a uniform theme that share the same contrast ratios. It offers a number of slick visualizations, accessibility options and ways to export everything. There’s even a plugin that allows you to pull your palette directly into Figma.
Supa Pallete
Supa Pallette is an elegant Figma plugin with a paid option. I’ve tested a fair share of Figma plugins, and this one is packed with features and worth the license. Starting with a seed color, the tool allows you to customize WCAG or APCA accessibility contrast scale, export visual color tiles for preview and even generate Figma variables.
Takeaways
For as complicated as color can be, we’re lucky to have access to so many resources. Some takeaways our team at Exygy now uses to make color decisions:
Align the team on accessibility guidelines like WCAG or APCA
Meet with designers to find out what Figma tooling and color method, including HEX or HSL, are the most intuitive for them
To ensure adoption, talk with engineering to find out what a valuable output format looks like, whether that’s CSS or tokens
Color needs to do the hard work of balancing brand voice with utility and accessibility. Fortunately there's color tooling to help designers with the complexity of managing contrast across multiple colors, tints and shades. A valuable color tool should allow you to do a couple of things:
Seed your palette with brand colors
Provide sufficient tints and shades with documented accessibility contrast
Generate output that can be leveraged by design and engineering team members
Genome Color Tool
The Genome Color web app allows you to create custom color scales from brand colors by leveraging recommended tints/shades from proven color systems. The thinking behind the tool is so smart it makes my head spin and the video tutorial provided makes it super easy to use.
Leonardo
by Nate Baldwin
Leonardo is a web app that allows you to build out multiple color ramps for a uniform theme that share the same contrast ratios. It offers a number of slick visualizations, accessibility options and ways to export everything. There’s even a plugin that allows you to pull your palette directly into Figma.
Supa Pallete
Supa Pallette is an elegant Figma plugin with a paid option. I’ve tested a fair share of Figma plugins, and this one is packed with features and worth the license. Starting with a seed color, the tool allows you to customize WCAG or APCA accessibility contrast scale, export visual color tiles for preview and even generate Figma variables.
Takeaways
For as complicated as color can be, we’re lucky to have access to so many resources. Some takeaways our team at Exygy now uses to make color decisions:
Align the team on accessibility guidelines like WCAG or APCA
Meet with designers to find out what Figma tooling and color method, including HEX or HSL, are the most intuitive for them
To ensure adoption, talk with engineering to find out what a valuable output format looks like, whether that’s CSS or tokens
Color needs to do the hard work of balancing brand voice with utility and accessibility. Fortunately there's color tooling to help designers with the complexity of managing contrast across multiple colors, tints and shades. A valuable color tool should allow you to do a couple of things:
Seed your palette with brand colors
Provide sufficient tints and shades with documented accessibility contrast
Generate output that can be leveraged by design and engineering team members
Genome Color Tool
The Genome Color web app allows you to create custom color scales from brand colors by leveraging recommended tints/shades from proven color systems. The thinking behind the tool is so smart it makes my head spin and the video tutorial provided makes it super easy to use.
Leonardo
by Nate Baldwin
Leonardo is a web app that allows you to build out multiple color ramps for a uniform theme that share the same contrast ratios. It offers a number of slick visualizations, accessibility options and ways to export everything. There’s even a plugin that allows you to pull your palette directly into Figma.
Supa Pallete
Supa Pallette is an elegant Figma plugin with a paid option. I’ve tested a fair share of Figma plugins, and this one is packed with features and worth the license. Starting with a seed color, the tool allows you to customize WCAG or APCA accessibility contrast scale, export visual color tiles for preview and even generate Figma variables.
Takeaways
For as complicated as color can be, we’re lucky to have access to so many resources. Some takeaways our team at Exygy now uses to make color decisions:
Align the team on accessibility guidelines like WCAG or APCA
Meet with designers to find out what Figma tooling and color method, including HEX or HSL, are the most intuitive for them
To ensure adoption, talk with engineering to find out what a valuable output format looks like, whether that’s CSS or tokens