About Palettos
Palettos started from a recurring frustration. Across years of building design systems, our founding editors kept seeing the same failure: a beautiful palette, approved with enthusiasm, that fell apart within a year — undocumented, duplicated, inaccessible, and impossible to change safely. The tools available were excellent at producing palettes and almost silent about everything that happens afterwards.
We built Palettos to cover the whole life of a color system: creation, codification, testing, evolution. And because tools alone don't make good decisions, we paired them with a publication explaining the reasoning behind good color practice.
Editorial team
Mira Okonkwo-Lind
Editor-in-chief, color systems
Mira spent eleven years building design systems for banking and public-sector products in Copenhagen and Lagos. She leads Palettos' editorial program and reviews every article before publication.
Tomás Reyes
Accessibility lead
Tomás is a certified accessibility professional (IAAP CPACC) who has audited over two hundred digital products against WCAG. He is deuteranomalous himself, which he describes as 'the most useful professional handicap I have'.
Hana Sato
Contributing editor, print & material
Hana trained as a printmaker in Kyoto before moving into brand design. She writes about the gap between screen colour and physical material, and still mixes her own inks.
Editorial standards
Every article and case study on Palettos is written by a named author and reviewed by a second editor before publication. Reviews check three things: technical accuracy against the cited standard (for example, WCAG 2.2 thresholds or the W3C Design Tokens format), that every example palette actually demonstrates what the text claims, and that advice is actionable.
Articles show both a published and an updated date. We update when a cited standard changes or when a reader reports an error; corrections are noted in the changelog. Case studies are composites drawn from our editors' professional work, with client names anonymized — we say so on every case study.
We do not publish mass-generated pages, keyword variations, or AI-written articles. We don't accept payment for coverage.
How we use AI — and where we don't
AI is used inside the tools, where it helps: generating palette ideas from a mood description, drafting rationales, and answering questions in the assistant. By default the studio uses a deterministic built-in engine; if you add your own OpenAI key, requests go directly from your browser to OpenAI.
Many features deliberately do not use AI, because an algorithm is more honest. Contrast checks, color-blind simulation, accessibility remediation, image extraction and pigment recipes (in demo mode) are all computed with published formulas, and the studio shows its working — ratios, ΔE values, the model used.
AI never writes our editorial content. Humans decide what to publish, and humans are accountable for it.
Contact
General enquiries and corrections: hello@palettos.com. Editorial: editors@palettos.com. We aim to respond within three working days.