PalettePeek

Guides & articles

Practical writing on color quantization, WCAG contrast and building color scales — from the people who built the extractor.

A printed color guide fanned open, showing rows of yellow, orange, pink, blue and green swatches with their codes

WCAG contrast ratios explained: 4.5:1 and 3:1

Where the contrast formula comes from, which threshold applies where, the exceptions most teams miss, and the honest limits of the WCAG 2.x model.

7 min read
A wooden artist's palette with dabs of red, white, yellow and brown oil paint and a brush mixing a dark colour

Extracting a color palette from a photo

Downsampling, median cut, k-means and pixel weighting — what each step does, and how to turn a list of swatches into a usable interface palette.

6 min read
A row of sharpened colored pencils of varying heights lined up against a white background

Building a Tailwind-style 50–950 color scale

Why HSL ramps drift, how an OKLCH ramp keeps its hue, what gamut clamping does to the ends of the scale, and how to sit semantic tokens on top of it.

6 min read