Pairette

Import

A palette that exists somewhere already does not have to be typed in again. Pairette reads design tokens, Adobe swatch exchange, and any plain text that holds color values — which covers the CSS this application exports as much as a handful of values pasted out of a mail.

Two of them carry a palette whole. A design token file written here keeps every medium beside the standard value, each marked as decided or derived, in an extension of its own — so it reads as an ordinary token file anywhere else and as a complete palette when it comes back. Adobe swatch files carry the decided values of all three media as well. The CSS export does not, and is not meant to: a stylesheet addresses a display, so it holds the screen values and leaves print and spot out.

One thing stays with the address alone: the notation each value was written in. Which form a color was decided in is part of what was decided, and none of these file formats has a place for it.

Adobe swatch exchange

RGB, CMYK and measured Lab values, spot markers included. All three media arrive decided rather than derived — this is what layout applications actually exchange.

Design Tokens (W3C)

Design tokens per the W3C draft: all fourteen color spaces of CSS Color 4, both value forms, and references between tokens. A file written here carries print and spot beside the standard value and comes back whole; a foreign one yields screen colors, which is all the specification admits.

List of color values

Hex values, CSS custom properties or preprocessor variables, one per line or separated by commas — the CSS this application exports among them. Yields screen colors.

Hand a palette over

A file wins over pasted text. Nothing is stored: what arrives is read once and the palette lives in the address from then on.

Cancel

Pairette helps you find colors that hold up next to each other — readable on screen, in print and as spot colors. Put together the palette you want to work on, and it says which pairs carry and which do not.