an interactive color exploration and mixing application that lets you discover and blend colors from curated artistic palettes. built as a web app served by a lightweight go binary, iroflow combines modern web technologies with efficient backend performance. iro (色) is the japanese word for color, a nod to wada sanzo's palettes that were the genesis of this app
drag anywhere on the screen to adjust hue, saturation, lightness, red, green, or blue in real-time. as you explore the color space, visual guides appear showing nearby colors from the palette datasets, creating an intuitive discovery experience.
key features
iroflow features 669+ curated colors from two datasets: wada sanzo's original japanese color palettes from 1933-34, and color lisa's extractions from 102 famous artworks. the intelligent hsl-based matching system shows you colors within ±25° hue, ±30% saturation, and ±20% lightness as you drag.
interactive drag target dots appear dynamically, sized progressively to show distance to nearby palette colors. the app maintains wcag aa contrast ratios automatically, ensuring text and borders remain readable against any background.
ephemeral user palette building allows a user to build a usable palette, but ensures they will always come in fresh to the experience with no prior influence from them. intentionally an exploratory space, not a framework to manage palettes
the stack
the frontend uses vanilla javascript with vite for fast builds and hot module replacement. modular architecture separates color utilities, drag behavior, palette selection, and ui management into focused modules.
a single go binary serves the static assets and provides a simple, portable deployment. the app supports multiple color spaces including hex, rgb, and hsl.