For folks looking to dive deep into thinking deeply about the intersection of colors, accessibility and design systems, I’ve curated this list of resources that I have personally found helpful. This comes from the work I am doing at Cisco on color and the design token system. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions at [email protected] or on Twitter.

🤓 Background reading

Many design system teams and designers have looked at how to create systematic, contrast-based color systems and there is a lot of continuous work in this area. Here is a sampling of that work:

• Stripe on designing accessible color systems
• Harmony A perceptually uniform color system released by Evil Martians in 2023
• Kevin Muldoon on using meaningful weights
• Stop using HSL for color systems
• Learning about LCH
• **Huetone** Useful tool for seeing how other color systems are structured up
• **Genome Color** Useful tool created by Kevin Muldoon that uses the LCH color model for structuring and creating systematic color systems
• IBM Carbon on colors in data visualizations
• Lyft’s talk on designing a comprehensive color system
• A guide on all things color by Nate Baldwin

🌈 Tools for generating color palettes

These are a many useful tools for when you are beginning to generate a color palette / system. With these type of tools, I’ve generally found them to be a good starting point and colors then require some tweaking by hand.

• **Colorbox.io** Created by the Lyft team, useful for initial creation of a color palette.
• **Supa Palette** New-ish palette generator in Figma, supports variety of color spaces
• Tints.dev Palette generator and API for Tailwind CSS
• Color x Color Color generator similar to Colorbox