🎨 Color tools — where design starts
Color decides over 60% of a brand's first impression. Identical copy and layout will read as trustworthy or cheap depending on the palette. PXLTool's color category covers palette generation, HEX/RGB/HSL/CMYK conversion, image color extraction, WCAG contrast, color-blind simulation, gradients, and dark-mode conversion — the full design-system lifecycle. Every tool is free, no sign-up, runs entirely in your browser.
📐 Recommended workflow (build a brand color system)
- Pick a brand color — Red (energy/urgency), blue (trust/professional), green (nature/growth), purple (creativity/luxury). Use color psychology as a starting point.
- Expand to a palette — Palette Generator auto-generates analogous, complementary, triadic from one base. Color Harmony applies the 60-30-10 rule.
- Shade/tint system — Shade Generator builds the 11-step lightness ramp (50/100/200…900) like Tailwind or Material Design.
- Contrast check — WCAG Contrast Checker ensures readable 4.5:1 minimum; aim for 7:1 on body text.
- Color-blind verification — Color-Blind Simulator validates red-green and blue-yellow color-blind viewers can still parse the UI.
- Print-ready CMYK — HEX↔CMYK Converter previews print colors; final tuning happens with the printer's ICC profile.
- Dark mode — Dark Mode Converter generates a dark variant from your light palette.
🛠 All color tools
💡 Practical color tips
- Use both RGB and HSL. RGB matches output; HSL is intuitive for adjusting lightness/saturation. Define design tokens in HSL, render in HEX.
- sRGB → CMYK is lossy. Neon, deep blue, and saturated reds fall outside CMYK gamut and look muddy in print. Define core brand colors with Pantone spot inks if exactness matters.
- Dark mode is not just inversion. A naive flip from white-on-black causes saturation overload and halo artifacts. Use #0f172a instead of pure black; #f1f5f9 instead of pure white. Reduce saturation by 30-40%.
- Name your colors. "brand-pink-500" beats "#ec4899" for collaboration. Use CSS variables + design tokens.
- Accessibility is non-negotiable. Roughly 5% of people are color-blind. Don't encode meaning in color alone — pair with icons, text, patterns.