This started as I was designing something in Figma that had a bunch of slightly different off-white colors. And I remember thinking something to the effect of "I wish I was able to pick colors that are close a lot easier..." And as soon as I had that thought I wrote it down because something about it felt like a little goldmine.

Simple in its idea but also novel in the fact I've never seen this solution. It started in Figma by putting together screenshots and simple ui designs together into some frankesteined monstrosity to figure out how this problem could be solved.

I knew how I wanted the interaction to feel, and now with a vague idea for the design, I went to Claude to start iterating on real thing. AI does a great job of getting you 80% of the way with an okay functioning idea, but most of the time was spent on making the minute interactions with the mini-map, main color picker, and hex to RGB values as polished as possible.

And as I was using the color picker more and more, the one missing feature in my mind was shortcuts for the light, mid-tone, and dark shades.

Surprisingly, posting this on X has done far better than anything I've ever posted. And it was really exciting to see legitimate signal in the design community that this was a desired feature. People were saying they wished it existed or that they were going to expand on the idea for their own product.

Because of all the feedback, I converted it to a plugin in Figma. The problem I ran into though was the friction of having to actually open a plugin for something that felt it should be native to a program. Not only was their friction to using it, but the color picker isn't something Figma even allows you to use in a plugin.

So at the end of the day, it's a super cool idea! But likely something that just has to be native to a program.