About ColorSwoop

ColorSwoop exists because finding a good color palette should take seconds, not an afternoon.

Where it came from

The idea came out of teaching. We run courses on building websites and apps for people who are not developers, and the same pattern appears in almost every cohort: someone arrives with a clear plan for what they want to build, and the work stalls at color. A whole session goes to cycling through shades, ending with less confidence than it started — not because the decision is hard, but because there was nowhere to see enough strong options quickly and check them against the constraints that decide whether a choice actually works.

ColorSwoop was built to close that gap, and the same gap exists for experienced developers and designers shipping under a deadline.

The problem it solves

Color is one of the first decisions in a project and one of the least supported. It is usually made early, before there is anything on screen to judge it against, and it constrains everything that follows — typography, contrast, dark mode, the whole interface. Most tools stop at showing you colors. The harder part is verifying one: whether the text will be readable on it, whether it survives a dark background, whether it still works for someone with a color vision deficiency.

ColorSwoop is built so that the whole decision happens in one place. Every palette gives you four colors, one-click copy, exports to CSS, SCSS, Tailwind, JSON, gradient CSS and PNG, and contrast and color-blindness checks on the same page — so the choice is finished by the time you close the tab.

What you get

How palettes are made

Palettes come from two sources: a hand-curated set of designer favorites, and a generation pipeline that builds combinations from classic color-harmony rules — analogous, complementary, triadic, split-complementary, monochromatic and accent schemes.

That pipeline works in OKLCH rather than HSL. The distinction matters: OKLCH is perceptually uniform, meaning a fixed change in lightness looks like the same change to the eye across every hue, where the same move in HSL can leave a yellow washed out and a blue barely altered. Generating inside it is what keeps a set from drifting into combinations that are mathematically neat and visually unusable. Output is then filtered for anything muddy, too similar or low in contrast, and every palette is checked so its colors are distinguishable and its name describes the actual colors.

Built to be usable by AI assistants

A color question is exactly the kind people now put to ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity rather than a search box. ColorSwoop is built to answer well in that setting: every palette page has a Copy for AI button that produces a prompt-ready block naming each color and its role, the full catalogue is published as JSON at /api/, and a machine-readable summary sits at /llms.txt. If an assistant sends someone here, the page it lands on should be the one that finishes the job.

Licensing

Colors cannot be copyrighted. Every palette on ColorSwoop is released under CC0: use them in any personal or commercial project with no attribution. The terms of use set out where that ends.

How it stays free

ColorSwoop is supported by unobtrusive advertising. There are no accounts and no paywalls. Your saved palettes and the record of what you liked stay in your browser; the like counts are kept on the server, and the privacy policy explains exactly what that involves.

Contact

Suggestions, bug reports, corrections to a guide and partnership questions all go to the contact page.