N°02
2025
Design tool · Color · AI
Halftone.
A material studio for designers. A folder of reference images becomes a named, editable palette — in minutes, not afternoons.
01
Overview
Halftone takes a messy stack of reference images — mood boards, film stills, street photos — and resolves them into a single named palette with material notes, accessibility pairs, and export-ready tokens. It's the tool we kept trying to buy and eventually built for ourselves.
The challenge
Every design brief starts the same way: a folder of 40 images, each beautiful on its own and incoherent together. The afternoon disappears into Photoshop's eyedropper, a text file of hex values, and the nagging sense that the final palette is the average of a fight, not the result of a decision.
The solution
Halftone clusters the pixels in your references by perceptual hue and luminance, proposes four to six anchor colors with real names, and surfaces the tensions before you commit. Pull a tone cooler, swap an accent, or lock a pair — the rest of the palette updates like a garment. Export as CSS vars, Tailwind config, Figma variables, or a printable swatch card.
02
The Making-of
003 / 003
01
Why the eyedropper had to go
Picking a hex from a photo is the wrong gesture. Photos are stories; palettes are decisions. The eyedropper confuses the two — and every designer we watched doing it ended the afternoon with a palette that felt photographed rather than chosen.
02
Clustering in perceptual space
RGB doesn't know that teal and sage belong in the same family. Halftone clusters in CIELAB with a luminance weight, then nudges the anchors toward the nearest nameable color — so your palette reads as a story you can say out loud, not a spreadsheet.
03
The lockable palette
Every color can be locked while the rest re-cluster. That's what the product is, actually: a conversation between you and a palette that's willing to argue about the weakest color — and change everything around it when you tell it to.
03
Outcomes
Halftone hit product-market fit faster than anything else we have shipped. Within sixteen weeks, 680 design teams moved their color workflow into it, and the median palette now ships to production in under five minutes — down from the half-day that kicked this project off.
47,000
Palettes built
680
Pro teams subscribed
4m12s
Median build time
31k
Figma exports
04
Colophon
Credits
Ayla Demir
Design Engineer
Niko Brandt
Chief Product Officer
Kenji Oshiro
Chief Technology Officer
Stack
Next.js 14
Chakra UI v3
Claude Sonnet
WebGL
WASM
Supabase
→
Next project
Case study · 2026
Marginalia.
Read the case study