Polychrom—APCA Contrast Checker

Maker

📌

Hey everyone, I’m thrilled to unveil my third product as a maker: Harmony, a unique UI color palette! Why is it so unique? First, it’s intensely focused on accessibility. Next, it leverages cutting-edge color technology and provides features that make it a dependable companion for any design system. Finally, Harmony is available for free and is provided as both a Figma file and an npm package. 👉 Check out my Twitter thread where I explain how Harmony was designed and how designers and developers can benefit from it: https://twitter.com/romanshamin_... --- Here are seven Harmony features that simplify the lives of designers and developers: 1. Equal contrast within lightness levels. Configure your UI effortlessly with dozens of switchable accent colors, as you can do on macOS. Ensure that the text on a yellow button is as legible as the text on a blue one. This functionality is achieved, because in Harmony, colors such as Blue 600, Green 600, and all others within the 600 level maintain the same contrast level. 2. Mirrored contrast columns simplify the creation of UI themes—both light and dark—and also ensure consistent color contrast for text and buttons in those themes. This is made possible by organizing color columns in Harmony as pairs, with the same contrast mirrored across the central column. 3. P3 gamut support for richer colors. Harmony leverages up to 49% more colors from the P3 gamut, enhancing the vibrancy of every color in the palette on modern displays. Be sure to use the Display P3 color profile in Figma to access all these vibrant colors. 4. Consistent chroma and perceived lightness ensure that all colors within a group appear remarkably similar. This cohesive approach helps semantically related, yet differently colored elements, such as user avatars, tags, and notifications, maintain a uniform appearance, even when placed in different sections of the UI. 5. Tailwind compatibility. Harmony seamlessly integrates with Tailwind’s color count, lightness levels, and naming conventions. Additionally, Harmony is available as an npm package that includes color configurations for Tailwind. 6. Figma variables support. You’ll find the palette neatly organized in the ‘Harmony Primitives’ collection. Simply assign these variables to your semantic tokens and configure UI theming modes, keeping the mirrored contrast columns in mind. 7. OKLCH as the source of truth. Harmony provides an OKLCH color code for each sample. Use these codes to ensure color consistency between Figma and CSS, since copying and pasting HEX codes into CSS may not produce the desired results if the Figma document is set to Display P3 mode. --- Harmony was developed by a team of believers at Evil Martians, specializing in product consulting for developer tools. 🙇‍♂️ Roman Shamin (https://twitter.com/romanshamin_en), creator of OKLCH Color Picker & Converter, Polychrom APCA contrast checker, and Martian Mono font. 🙇‍♂️ Anton Lovchikov (https://twitter.com/antiflasher), creator of apcach—a JS color calculator for composing colors with a consistent APCA contrast ratio. 🙇‍♂️ Gleb Stroganov (https://twitter.com/strongeron), product designer at Evil Martians. 🙇‍♂️ Ivan Buryak (https://twitter.com/11bit), frontend engineer at Evil Martians. --- We all are truly grateful for your support. Feel free to share your thoughts! 🙌

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1yr ago

Constantin Wintoniak

fynk

@romanshamin The Tailwind support is super helpful on this. Did you by any chance check the Tailwind defaults for their accessibility level and was that one of the factors that influenced your devision to make this product reality?

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1yr ago

Roman Shamin

Polychrom—APCA Contrast Checker

Maker

@wintoniak yes, we are big fans of Tailwind itself and the Tailwind color palette, which we extensively use in our projects. And yes, every time the color contrast in our UIs played a significant role, we found ourselves wishing to surpass the possibilities of Tailwind’s palette. So, it’s true, that was one of many initial driving forces for us!

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1yr ago

Alexander Isora 🦄

Unicorn Platform

Hunter

📌

Product Hunt has seen thousands of color palette types of products but this one is serious thing with an idea and science behind it. I'm using Harmony for all my sideprojects for now.

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1yr ago

Anton Lovchikov

Harmony: Accessible UI Color Palette

Maker

📌

Our story begins with a pressing need. Back in the day, all existing color palettes faced a common issue: some colors were excessively bright, while others were overly dark. Utilizing any of these existing palettes would undoubtedly lead to accessibility problems down the road. To tackle this challenge, my colleagues and I devoted numerous hours manually crafting colors for each project. We meticulously examined each color using contrast calculators, and we assessed the consistency of the resulting color set with our own eyes. Then came the game-changer: OKLCH. This innovative model introduced a perceptual lightness axis and a consistent chroma axis, making our color selection process significantly more manageable. However, there was still a lingering issue - the contrast ratio wasn't as consistent as we desired. We wanted more. A groundbreaking idea: what if we calculated colors in a way that ensures all colors within the same level have precisely the same contrast ratio? The concept was intriguing, but the implementation was undeniably challenging. It appeared that no one—not a single designer—had ever explored this idea before. There were no ready-made solutions for calculating colors based on desired contrast values. So, we made the bold decision to roll up our sleeves and create an algorithm from the ground up. We put our ideas to the test with a proof of concept on Codepen, and the result of our efforts amazed even us—a palette that harmonized perfectly. I'm so proud of what we accomplished. The colors we created are not only visually solid but also exhibit consistent chroma and perceived lightness. Even when we play around with different hues, our test interface maintains an astounding level of consistency. And that's where our mission of bringing Dynamic UI Themes to the world was born! I really believe that fellow designers will save hours and upon hours of active work time and will be delighted with the outcome. This project hasn't just provided us with a solution to our immediate problem; it has ignited a passion within us to delve deeper into the world of colors, their intricate relationships, and the vital aspects of accessibility. We are so inspired by this journey that we decided to distill our color calculation algorithm into an open-source library called apcach (https://github.com/antiflasher/a...). This library is just the beginning! We're hard at work on many more tools that will prove invaluable to designers and developers. Stay tuned for exciting updates, and join us as we explore the colorful world of design and accessibility!

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1yr ago

Harmony: Accessible UI Color Palette

Elevating UI contrast control to a new level of precision