Blog
Color tech, demystified.
Long-form posts on color picking, the EyeDropper API, OKLCH, browser-native superpowers, and design-system color tokens.
The best colour picker for developers in 2026: browser-native vs extensions vs desktop apps
An honest comparison of the four ways developers sample colours — browser-native EyeDropper, browser extensions, desktop utilities, and DevTools — with the trade-offs each makes on privacy, speed, and capability.
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Building an accessible colour palette from a single brand colour
How to turn one hex code into a full, accessible design-system palette — lightness ramps in OKLCH, chroma curves, semantic tokens, dark mode, and the contrast checks that keep it honest.
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Extracting brand colours from a logo, a screenshot, or a PDF
A practical workflow for pulling accurate brand colours out of logos, screenshots, PDFs and websites — including the antialiasing, compression and colour-profile traps that give you the wrong hex.
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HEX vs RGB vs HSL vs OKLCH: which colour format should you actually use?
Four ways to write the same colour, each with a real reason to exist. A practical comparison of HEX, RGB, HSL and OKLCH — what each is good at, where each breaks, and which one to reach for in 2026.
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How to pick a color from any app on your screen
A practical guide to sampling a colour from a video, a PDF, a Figma board, a game, or any native app — using the browser's built-in EyeDropper API instead of installing a desktop utility.
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WCAG contrast explained: how to check colour accessibility properly
A practical guide to WCAG 2.1 contrast ratios — what 4.5:1 actually means, how the maths works, the large-text exemption, the APCA future, and the mistakes that quietly ship inaccessible interfaces.
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Why a browser colour picker needs no permissions (and what that means for your privacy)
The EyeDropper API reads pixels from anywhere on your screen — including other applications — without a single permission prompt. Here's the security model that makes that safe, and how it differs from screen sharing.
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ColorZilla vs Screen Color Picker: why I built a no-install alternative
ColorZilla is a great Chrome extension. But every extension that can sample pixel data needs 'read all your data on all websites'. Here's why I built a sandboxed website alternative instead.
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OKLCH explained: the modern color format every designer should know
Tailwind v4, Radix, and most modern design systems are switching to OKLCH. Here's what it is, why HSL gets it wrong, and how to pick OKLCH values without installing anything.
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What is the window.EyeDropper API? Your browser's hidden superpower
Chrome shipped a system-wide color picker as a built-in JavaScript API in 2021. Most developers still don't know it exists. Here's how it works, what it can do, and why every browser should ship it.
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