ColorScreens

Why it exists

This one was built for ourselves first. Designing a site means constantly needing a screen filled with one exact color: to check a display, hunt a dead pixel, judge a palette against a room, or light a face for a photograph without carrying a light.

Doing that involved opening an image editor, making a canvas, filling it, and going full screen. Four steps for something that should be a URL. So it became a URL.

The more we used it, the more obvious it was that photographers, developers and anyone who has ever tried to match a paint chip to a screen wanted the same thing.

What we decided

• Nothing you pick is ever sent to a server

  A color is not sensitive data, but sending it anywhere would be pure ceremony. The whole thing runs in the page.

• Every page reachable from every page

  A crawl in July found pages orphaned behind a menu that needed script to open. The footer now carries the full map, built from the same tree as the navigation, so nothing depends on a drawer being tapped.

• The palettes are opinionated

  Vintage pinball, retro games, old packaging. Saturated blues, glowing reds, impossible purples, neon greens. Colors chosen by people who were not afraid of them.