ColorLab

Color Lab is an interactive color palette generator designed for graphic designers and creatives who work with color. The motivation behind it came from a personal frustration: every time I designed a monthly newsletter for my club, I spent more time choosing seasonal colors than actually designing. No existing tool addressed this specific need, so I built one. The design question I explored was: can a color tool respond to both external context and internal feeling at the same time? Most palette generators are either random or require you to already know what you want. Color Lab takes a different approach by combining season and mood as inputs, letting the tool meet the designer where they are emotionally and temporally. The tool opens with four season buttons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, each mapped to a curated set of color ranges that reflect that time of year. The SAD to HAPPY mood slider then adjusts the brightness and saturation of the entire palette in real time, so the same seasonal palette can feel melancholic or energetic depending on where you drag it. Users can also upload any image to extract its five dominant colors, which also respond to the mood slider. Each swatch shows its hex code for easy copying, and favorite palettes can be saved and reloaded instantly. The biggest takeaway from building Color Lab was learning how much can be done with simple math and p5.js alone. I also learned how to integrate HTML inputs like file upload and color picker directly into a p5.js sketch, which opened up a lot of new possibilities for how interactive tools can be built with code.