color.fathom.info

I created Fathom Color Kit as a tool for building color palettes and as an educational resource for students to experiment with using color to communicate.

The idea is all about discovering expressive color pairings through a combination of strategy and serendipity. It can be especially difficult to make smart decisions about color on screen using a bright rainbow color wheel or a panel of text inputs. Color Kit offers a more natural environment for expanding a digital palette with a stripped-down interface that maximizes color-on-color borders. There’s also a bit of math behind the scenes to present a range of pairing possibilities that could push a design in a new direction.

You can also generate and remix color studies to test the mood of a palette across shapes and textures — I developed this feature for lecture / workshop sessions I’ve organized for Ben Fry’s Information Design and Visualization course at MIT.

Anything you make with the tool can be downloaded as .pdf, and you can optionally upload a text file with hex, rgb or lab values to expand an existing palette. The next features I’d like to add are options for sketching palettes from uploaded images.