A Book of Colors

Color, organized.

For years I've worked in two rooms: one full of canvases, one full of screens. This app is the door between them — palettes curated the way a painter sees color, built the way a designer expects a tool to feel.

Download on the App Store
A Book of Colors main view

Ambient mode

Press and hold the menu button and the app goes full screen, with every label and control hidden. Palettes drift and auto-cycle. Just color.

Press and hold to reorder

Press and hold any color, then drag it onto another to rearrange a palette. It saves automatically.

800+ palettes, sorted by feel

Organized by mood: warm, cool, vibrant, neutral, dark. Swipe up for a new palette, down to go back. Tap any color to copy its hex code. Save the ones you love.

800+ palettes, sorted by feel

Palettes from my paintings

One pack is drawn directly from my canvases. The Starter Kit adds the rest. New packs arrive over time; the app checks automatically.

Palettes from my paintings

Built from color theory

Six harmony schemes: Complementary, Analogous, Triadic, Split-Complementary, Tetradic, Monochromatic. Pick a base color and the palette generates live. Save it, or use it as a starting point.

Built from color theory

Pull colors from any photo

Point at a painting, a room, a sunset. The app finds the dominant colors using k-means clustering. Any image becomes a palette you can use or save.

Pull colors from any photo

Now on the Mac

A Book of Colors runs on the Mac too. It lives in your menu bar, one click away, with keyboard shortcuts and the same Ambient mode (⇧⌘A).

A Book of Colors on the Mac

How it works

  • Swipe up to load a new random palette
  • Swipe down to go back to the previous palette
  • Swipe left or right to change the layout
  • Tap the circle icon to open the settings panel
  • Press and hold the circle icon to enter Ambient mode
  • Press and hold any color, then drag onto another to reorder
  • # Tap any color to copy its hex code to clipboard
  • Use Photo in the Create tab to generate palettes from any image