Hue Codex

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Hue Codex is a free, no-account color workspace for designers and developers, with palette generation, WCAG contrast checks, modern CSS tools, image color extraction, local saving, and exports.

Free Color Tools Color Apps

Category:Color Tools

Subcategory:Color Apps

Pricing:Free

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About Hue Codex

What Is Hue Codex?

Hue Codex is a free, browser-based color workspace for designers and developers. It brings color picking, conversion, palette creation, accessibility testing, modern CSS output, image sampling, gradients, local saving, and practical color reference material into one connected experience.

No account is required. Users can begin with a color, inspect it across modern and traditional color models, test how it performs in real interface contexts, build a role-based palette, and export the result for design or development work.

What Hue Codex Does

Hue Codex provides tools for the full color workflow:

Pick and inspect colors using HEX, RGB, HSL, HWB, Lab, LCH, OKLab, OKLCH, and other production formats.
Convert colors between web, perceptual, and color-science models.
Generate role-based palettes with primary, secondary, accent, surface, text, border, success, warning, and danger colors.
Lock useful palette colors while regenerating the remaining roles.
Check foreground and background combinations against WCAG AA, AAA, large-text, and interface contrast targets.
Find readable text colors and accessible pairings within a palette.
Simulate common color-vision differences and review focus-ring and link-color visibility.
Generate CSS variables, modern CSS color syntax, gradients, Sass maps, JSON, token-style data, SVG strips, PNG palettes, and handoff summaries.
Extract palettes or exact pixel colors from images processed locally in the browser.
Build tints, shades, tones, lightness scales, harmonies, mixed colors, opacity combinations, and gradient palettes.
Explore guides, glossary definitions, CSS named colors, color-model comparisons, and transparent calculation methodology.

A Connected Color Workflow

Hue Codex is designed as one workspace rather than a collection of disconnected calculators. Colors and settings can move directly between related tools, reducing the need to repeatedly copy and re-enter values.

A designer can select a color, convert it to OKLCH, check its contrast, use it as the seed of a palette, generate CSS variables, and share the exact configured result through a URL.

Tool states can be shared without an account, allowing another person to open the same color, palette, contrast pair, or gradient with its settings intact.

Local Saving Without an Account

Hue Codex includes a browser-local workspace for saving useful color work without registration. Users can retain presets, pinned colors, palettes, contrast pairs, gradients, image samples, and recent exports on their own device.

Workspace data can also be exported as a .huecodex.json file and imported into another browser later. This provides portability without requiring cloud storage or an online account.

Transparent Methodology

Hue Codex documents how its color conversions, WCAG contrast checks, palette generation, gamut checks, color-difference measurements, image processing, gradients, and exports work.

The methodology distinguishes between:

Standards-backed calculations
Hue Codex recommendations and heuristics
Approximate results
Browser-dependent behavior
Known limitations

Core color conversion and contrast calculations use deterministic logic rather than generative AI, helping results remain repeatable and explainable.

How Hue Codex Can Be Used

UI and UX designers can build role-based interface palettes, test text and component contrast, create state colors, and prepare implementation handoffs.

Frontend developers can convert modern CSS colors, generate variables and fallbacks, create gradients, inspect gamut behavior, and copy structured values into a codebase.

Brand and logo designers can explore harmonies, create palette systems, extract colors from reference images, compare similar colors, and document color roles.

Accessibility practitioners can review text contrast, non-text interface contrast, focus indicators, links, readable pairings, and color-vision differences.

Students and newer designers can use the integrated guides, glossary, named-color reference, and methodology pages to understand both the practical and technical sides of color.