Elkin StudioElkin Studio
Generative · Tooling2026Live prototype

Prism

A palette engine that reasons in light, not swatches.

Live prototypeDrag the hue, choose a harmony, and click any swatch to copy its token.
Initialising prototype_

The experiment/

  • Color science
  • Design systems
  • Tooling

Prism generates entire brand palettes from a single seed hue and a harmony rule, then tunes them in perceptual (oklch) space so every step feels evenly weighted to the eye rather than to the math. Drag the seed, switch the harmony, and export ready-to-paste design tokens.

Most palette tools operate in HSL or RGB, where a 10% lightness change looks tiny in yellow and enormous in blue. Prism works in oklch, a perceptually uniform space, so a ramp reads as a ramp regardless of hue. The result is palettes that behave in a real interface instead of just looking good in a grid.

We built it because we kept rebuilding the same colour logic on every identity project. Now the reasoning is encoded once: pick an anchor, pick a relationship, analogous, complementary, triad, split, and Prism resolves the rest, including accessible text pairings and a neutral ramp derived from the anchor's chroma.

It's the quiet engine behind a lot of the studio's first-week explorations. What used to be an afternoon of nudging hex codes is now a thirty-second conversation with a slider.

Prism, a lab experiment by Elkin Studio

Built with/

  • Canvas-free DOM
  • oklch color space
  • React
  • Perceptual harmony math
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