Inspiration is everywhere

Inspiration can come from anywhere. A website, a photograph, an illustration, or simply a color that catches your eye while you are working.

I keep Suisai running in the background throughout the day. Whenever I see a color I like, I capture it with a keyboard shortcut and carry on with what I’m doing. Each sampled color is added to Suisai’s menu and automatically copied to the clipboard in my chosen format, ready for immediate use. Over the course of the day, I build up a collection of colors that I might want to return to.

At the end of the day, or whenever I have a collection worth keeping, I turn those colors into a palette, give them custom names where useful, and save the palette to my library as a color scratchpad. Some colors might find their way into a project tomorrow, others months from now. Whenever I need them, I can quickly find them by searching for a color name, palette name, or even a specific color value.

Have you ever looked at a photograph and fallen in love with its atmosphere? It happens to me all the time, particularly with beautifully color-graded photographs that have a distinctive mood or feel.

With Suisai, you can capture the colors that give a photograph its character and turn them into a palette of your own. Simply drag an image into the palette window, choose from three extraction methods (learn how they differ), and select how many colors you’d like to extract, up to a maximum of 16 automatically. Everything is processed locally in memory. Your images are never uploaded or stored by Suisai.

Once the colors have been extracted, you can fine-tune your selections by moving the pins directly on the photograph. If the extraction missed a particular shade that caught your eye, simply add another pin to capture it. You can add as many manual selections as you like, and expand or zoom into the image for greater precision.

When you’re happy with the result, click Done to close the image viewer and commit the extracted colors to your palette. From there, you can rearrange the swatches, adjust individual colors, experiment with paint-like mixing, or save the palette for future projects.

Sometimes you know exactly which colors you’re looking for. Other times, you have a few ideas and want to experiment until you find a combination that feels right.

Suisai lets you build palettes in whichever way suits you. Start with an empty palette and create colors using the controls you’re most comfortable with, whether that’s RGB, HSB, HSL, or CMYK. Fine-tune your selections using sliders, spectrum pickers, or the color wheel until you find the shades you’re after.

You can also bring in colors you’ve collected previously. Search your palette library and drag individual colors directly into your new palette, or open several palettes at once and move swatches between them. Arrange colors as you add them, placing each swatch exactly where you want it without having to recreate anything.

Once you’re happy with your palette, save it to the macOS system Colors folder to make it available in applications that support the system color picker. Alternatively, use Save As to choose your own location and save in ASE, GPL, or CLR format. You can also export your colors in a variety of other formats for use in design and development tools.

Sometimes you have two colors you love and wonder what might sit between them. Other times, you find a particular shade and explore which colors could work alongside it.

Suisai gives you several ways to experiment with those relationships. Start with two colors you’ve sampled or enter their values directly, then use the Color Ramp to generate the shades between them. Choose how many steps you want and switch between sRGB and OKLab interpolation to explore how different color spaces affect the transition.

For a different approach, try one of Suisai’s seven color harmonies. Start with a color from an existing palette, then explore complementary, analogous, triadic and other relationships. Adjust the starting colors and watch the harmony update in real time as you experiment.

As you explore, you might discover a combination you want to keep. Harmonies and ramps can be transferred into regular palettes, where you can adjust individual colors independently, save your work, or export it for use in other applications.

Artists working with physical paints are familiar with mixing pigments to create the colors they need. Digital tools usually take a different approach, allowing you to select virtually any color directly. But sometimes, experimenting with color mixing is half the fun.

Traditional RGB blending combines colors mathematically, which doesn’t always produce the results you’d expect from mixing paint. Suisai takes a different approach, using spectral pigment mixing based on the Kubelka–Munk model to produce more paint-like results. Mix blue and yellow, for example, and you can create green rather than the grayish tones typical of RGB averaging.

The Color Bench (Umezara) lets you place colors side by side and compare their differences in hue, lightness, and overall perceptual color difference (ΔE). Adjust a color on the Bench and watch the corresponding swatch in your palette update live, along with the comparison measurements.

Open a mixing well between two colors to experiment with different proportions. Adjust the balance between them, or add white and black pigment to lighten or darken the mixture. Every new color can be kept on the Bench for further experimentation or sent directly to a palette for future use.

For most of my design career, I’ve relied on my eye when choosing color combinations. If something looked readable and the colors worked well together, I generally considered the job done. But what looks clear to me isn’t necessarily readable for everyone.

Suisai provides tools to help evaluate color combinations against WCAG 2.2 contrast requirements. Check foreground and background colors using your intended font size and weight, and see whether the combination meets AA or AAA contrast thresholds. The contrast ratio itself doesn’t change with typography, but the requirements differ for normal and large text.

If a combination falls short, Reach can suggest the smallest adjustment needed to meet your chosen contrast target. You can compare the suggested color with others before deciding whether to add it to a palette or replace an existing swatch.

The contrast matrix lets you compare up to 10 colors at once, whether they’re from a single palette, several palettes, the Color Bench, or suggestions from Reach. Send an entire palette in one action, or combine individual colors to see which pairings meet WCAG 2.2 contrast requirements.

You can also explore how your colors may appear to people with different types of color vision deficiency. Apply simulations to your palettes or within the contrast checker to identify color combinations that might become difficult to distinguish.

These tools don’t replace good design judgment, but they provide additional information that visual intuition alone can’t reliably measure.

Over time, it’s easy to accumulate color palettes across different applications, projects, and folders. Some might be Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) files, others GIMP palettes (GPL) or macOS color lists (CLR). You might also have colors defined in stylesheets from previous web projects.

Suisai works with your existing files, without requiring you to convert them into a proprietary format or reorganize your folders. Add your palette folders to the Library and Suisai indexes supported files where they already live, making their colors searchable from one place.

You can also work with colors from CSS and other supported stylesheets. Suisai identifies the color definitions within the code, letting you explore those colors, bring them into palettes, and reuse them in other projects.

Whether you’re revisiting an old project or working across different applications, your existing colors remain available without changing how you organize your files.

Finding the right colors is only part of the process. Sooner or later, you need to use them in the applications where you’re actually creating something.

Suisai makes that easy. Drag colors directly from a palette into compatible design applications, such as Affinity Designer. For applications that don’t support direct color sharing, you can install palettes into the macOS system color picker, making them available to other applications that use it.

If you work with code, choose your preferred output format and drag color values directly into your editor. Whether you’re working with CSS, Swift, or any of the 43 supported color formats, there’s no need to convert values manually. You don’t even have to drag: clicking a color copies its value to the clipboard in your selected format, ready to paste wherever you need it.

When you need more than a single color, export an entire palette in a format suited to your project. From stylesheets and structured data to palette files for other applications, Suisai gives you plenty of ways to take your work elsewhere.

Your colors aren’t tied to Suisai. They’re yours to use wherever you need them.