Color guides
No theory homework — every guide is a path you can follow: pick, balance, verify. All steps link straight into the tools and real palettes on this site.
The 60-30-10 Rule: a Universal Balance Formula
60% dominant, 30% secondary, 10% accent — why these three numbers, and how to build one in three steps with the palette editor.
Read the guideHow to Choose a Brand Primary Color
A five-step flow: industry avoidance, mood-to-HSL translation, finding open hue space, contrast verification, and growing it into a system.
Read the guideAccessible Palettes 101: WCAG & APCA
From 4.5:1 to APCA Lc 75: a complete readability check-up for your palette — what each algorithm covers and how to fix failures.
Read the guideColors for Charts & Papers: Dataviz Discipline
Why rainbow colormaps fail, which academic palettes to trust for categories, how to pick sequential ramps — a pre-submission checklist.
Read the guideDark Mode Palettes: Surface Levels, Not Inversion
Dark mode is not inverting colors — surface elevation, desaturated primaries, and a text gray scale make a complete dark design system.
Read the guideWritten from public color-science consensus; every tool link works out of the box.