Meet Colorpeek, a simple way to share and preview colors

When Tim Sears and I were almost done making Lotsa Blocks, we decided it might be fun to change the color of the blocks for seasonal holidays. Christmas blocks would be red and green, halloween blocks black and orange, etc.

Once I finished designing one of these color palettes in Illustrator, I had to send it to Tim. So I did what a lot of designers do: I threw together an image showing the colors and their corresponding hex values.

This worked fine, but the process was tedious for me to create and for Tim to reference (especially when he needed to convert them to RGB notation). I wanted a way to quickly and easily share colors without numerous steps, ongoing maintenance or even account creation.

I found a lot of great color-related apps (COLOURlovers, Palettee, color.hailpixel.com), but none that did exactly what I wanted.

So I made one. It’s called Colorpeek.

Now I can send Tim a link to the colors I want: colorpeek.com/#a899f2,dd4e85,4dc45e,6da7e8

And if he needs RGB, it’s as easy as tapping or clicking the cog icon and changing the notation,rgb(246,146,29),rgb(167,183,73),rgb(157,109,194)).

Colorpeek will accept just about any CSS color value, including hex (triplet or shorthand), RGB, RGBA, HSL and HSLA. It will convert color keywords like indigo or lightslategray to hex. It also supports many brand colors as keywords, so you can easily add facebook, android or wordpressorange to your palettes.

This being a 1.0 release, I tried hard to include only features I find to be critical. I hope to add more things from my list of “wants” to future iterations (copy to clipboard, transitions/animations, color picker, color editing, palette export options, to name a few).

If you have ideas for making Colorpeek better while retaining its simplicity, please let me know.

I want to thank Marc Roman for designing the Colorpeek logo, Erik Jung for helping me learn Knockout, my Cloud Four teammates for their support, encouragement and access to the device lab, and everyone who offered feedback or advice for my little side project.

You can follow me and/or @Colorpeek on Twitter for updates.