There are plenty of tools to work with colors on the web, but I wanted to build something like a swiss army knife for working with colors.

With ColorBot, you can:

• Convert between Hexadecimal, RGBa, and HSLa
• Create color palettes
• Easily share color palettes
• Quickly get tints and shades of a color
• And even get a rough name for a color

This project was initially built for A 10k Apart. I built a basic PHP backend with a dash of Javascript here and there to enhance the experience. (It should still work great whether the Javascript loads or not.)

First and foremost, I built ColorBot to be accessible. It will automatically suggest a color name to help colorblind and blind users get a rough idea of what color is being shown (in their palette, the selected color, and the tints and shades). I added accesskeys, skip links, and defined focus styles for easier keyboard navigation. And every time a new color is selected, I run a quick calculation to decide whether to show white or black text for the best contrast.

I've really enjoyed building ColorBot and I want to continue improving it in the future. Here are a few things I'd love to improve:

1. Database backend: I'd love to let people create and share multiple color palettes, "like" others palettes, etc. This is a lot easier with a database.
2. Reorderable palettes: You can "hack" reordering now by changing the order of hex codes in a shared paletted, but I'd love to add drag and drop reordering to make it easier.
3. Configurable thresholds: Right now, random color generation is hard-coded to match colors in a "flat" range (not too light, not too dark). I'd love to add a method for letting users choose different styles of colors (earthy, greys, pastels, all). I'd also love to add better tools for choosing custom tints and shades.
4. Color naming can always be improved.