algorithmic-color-palette

Algorithmic Colour Palette

A brand palette of 2–3 colours is not enough for a UI. You need shades for states (hover, active, disabled), neutrals for backgrounds and borders, and semantic colours for status. Deriving these algorithmically from the brand colours produces a palette that feels coherent — everything is visually related to the brand rather than pulled from a generic grey or a stock colour library.

Don't guess the seed colours — extract them (dembrandt engine, optional). If the brand already exists on the web, pull its real palette off the live site instead of eyeballing a hex: get_color_palette (or the extract-design skill) returns the actual computed brand and neutral colours from the DOM, which you then expand with the methods below. See extract-design for setup.

Deriving Interactive State Colours

From each brand colour, generate at minimum three variants: base, darker (hover/active), lighter (tint/background).

Method: HSL adjustment

base:    hsl(H, S%, L%)
hover:   hsl(H, S%, L% - 8%)     ← darken by reducing lightness
active:  hsl(H, S%, L% - 14%)    ← darken further
tint:    hsl(H, S%, L% + 40%)    ← lighten significantly for backgrounds
subtle:  hsl(H, S% * 0.3, L% + 45%)  ← heavily desaturated, near-white