AddThisFeature

Brand Palette Generator

Turn one brand colour into a full ramp the app can use without breaking contrast.

involved Design Systems

What it adds

A generator that expands a single seed colour into light and dark ramps with contrast held at every step.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Take a single seed colour and produce a ramp of named steps, each with a defined contrast target against the surfaces it is meant to sit on, rather than an evenly spaced set of tints that happens to look plausible.

  2. 2

    Generate the light and dark ramps independently. Inverting the light ramp gives dark mode a palette that is too saturated at the top and indistinguishable at the bottom — dark surfaces need less chroma and different spacing.

  3. 3

    Keep the status colours out of the brand ramp. Danger, warning, and success must remain legible as danger, warning, and success even when the brand colour is itself red or green, so derive them separately and only borrow the brand's chroma character.

  4. 4

    Let a person lock individual steps — usually the exact brand colour itself — and regenerate everything else around the locked values rather than overwriting them.

  5. 5

    Write the output into the existing semantic token map defined by Semantic Color Tokens. Do not emit a parallel palette file that components can reference directly; two sources of colour truth diverge within a release.

Edge cases it handles

7
  • Light and dark ramps must be generated separately rather than by inversion, because a ramp that reads correctly on white becomes either glaring or muddy when placed on a dark surface.
  • Every step needs its contrast checked against the surfaces it will actually be used on, not just against pure white and pure black, or the mid-range steps pass in theory and fail on cards.
  • The brand colour must not become the colour of every status. A brand-coloured success state and a brand-coloured error state leave users unable to tell an outcome apart from decoration.
  • Locked values must survive regeneration exactly. A brand colour that shifts by a fraction on each regeneration will eventually no longer match the printed guidelines it came from.
  • A very light or very dark seed leaves no room to extend the ramp in one direction — detect that case and say so rather than producing a ramp with five identical steps at one end.
  • A near-grey seed with almost no chroma produces a ramp indistinguishable from the neutral scale; require a minimum chroma or warn explicitly.
  • Regeneration must be previewable before it is applied, since it changes every screen at once.

Definition of done

9
  • One seed colour produces a complete named ramp for both light and dark.
  • The dark ramp is generated independently rather than derived by inverting the light ramp.
  • Every step meets its contrast target against the surfaces it is used on.
  • Status colours are derived separately and remain distinguishable from the brand colour.
  • Locked steps are preserved byte for byte through a regeneration.
  • Output populates the existing semantic token map, with no parallel palette file.
  • Degenerate seeds produce an explicit warning rather than a silently unusable ramp.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.