When it comes to design, color is king—but managing your color palette shouldn’t be a royal pain. That’s why I created the Fluid Color Palettes plugin for Figma, a tool designed to simplify color management, streamline workflows, and bring designers and developers onto the same page.
Motivation: Why Create This Plugin?
In the world of design, consistency is crucial. But achieving it across both design and development can be a headache. I wanted to create a tool that not only generated beautiful, dynamic color palettes but also ensured that these palettes could be easily used by both designers and developers. The result? Fluid Color Palettes—a plugin that does just that.
This plugin is for designers who want to maintain flexibility and adaptability in their projects, as well as developers who need a seamless way to integrate design tokens into their codebases. It’s a tool that closes the gap between the creative and the technical, ensuring that everyone is speaking the same language.
What Does It Do?
- Generate 1000+ Dynamic Variables with Stepped Opacity: Unlike static color codes, Fluid Color Palettes allows you to create variable-based palettes for total design flexibility. With this plugin, you can effortlessly switch between light and dark modes without manual adjustments.
- One-Click Brand Palette Customization: Automatically generate a brand palette tailored for diverse use-cases like backgrounds, foregrounds, and more—all based on your chosen base colors.
- Seamless Design-to-Development Workflow: With one generated link, you can integrate your palette directly into Figma and simultaneously generate color tokens for TailwindCSS and shadcn/ui, ensuring consistency across platforms and speeding up project timelines.
Closing the Gap Between Design and Development
One of the primary motivations behind Fluid Color Palettes was to bridge the gap between design and development teams. By generating unified color tokens, this plugin eliminates the back-and-forth that often plagues projects. Designers can create with confidence, knowing that their color choices will be consistent across all platforms, while developers can easily integrate these colors into their projects using familiar tools like TailwindCSS and shadcn/ui.
Showcase: Watch Fluid Color Palettes in Action
Curious about how it all works? Check out this YouTube video to see the plugin in action.
The Science Behind the Palette—Simplified
Behind the scenes, Fluid Color Palettes employs advanced color science to generate stunning and functional palettes. Our algorithm considers the luminosity and saturation of each color, ensuring that the palettes are not just visually appealing but also accessible, meeting WCAG 2.1 and APCA standards.
For those interested in the details, the color generation process starts by manually selecting main colors from different hues. These hues are then analyzed using mathematical formulas to ensure the right balance of saturation and luminosity, resulting in dynamic and adaptive color palettes.
How Figma Talks to the Website
The Fluid Color Palettes plugin connects to our website to fetch color data. This is done securely using a time-limited JWT token, which authenticates the Figma app and allows it to generate colors based on the user’s preferences. This seamless integration ensures that your colors are always up-to-date and ready to use in your designs.
The Future of Fluid Color Palettes
As we look to the future, we envision even more powerful features for Fluid Color Palettes. Potential developments include more advanced customization options, integrations with other design tools, and enhanced accessibility features. Our goal is to continue making the design-to-development process as smooth and efficient as possible.
Whether you’re a designer looking to elevate your color game or a developer in need of reliable design tokens, Fluid Color Palettes is here to make your workflow easier and more cohesive.
Feel free to make any adjustments or let me know if there are specific details you’d like to add!