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About this tool
Palettes drawn from Indian dyes, pigments and craft traditions, each with its material source, a contrast audit and a block-print greyscale check.
The Heritage India Palette Generator assembles six-role palettes from a library of historical Indian dyes, pigments and mineral colours — indigo from Indigofera tinctoria, madder root, lac resin, turmeric, red and yellow ochre, malachite green, lampblack and gold leaf — assigned to the roles a layout needs and labelled with the material each colour came from. Every palette is then measured twice: WCAG 2.x contrast for the text and motif pairings, and a greyscale separation check for the single-ink reproduction that block printing, screen printing and letterpress reduce artwork to. It is built for designers working on craft brands, museum and exhibition material, festival identities and packaging that has to look traditional without becoming unreadable.
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Provide your input — an image, text, or data.
Let the tool analyze or generate the result.
Review, refine, and reuse the output wherever you need it.
Each swatch names the dye, mineral or resin it derives from and where it appears in Indian craft.
Luminance separation is measured so you know which pairs merge once the artwork drops to a single ink.
Where a pigment is too mid-toned for body text, a lightness-adjusted version of the same hue is generated until it clears 4.5:1.
Historically from plants, insects, minerals and earth: indigo from fermented Indigofera tinctoria leaves, red from Rubia cordifolia madder root or Kerria lacca resin, yellow from turmeric or ochre clay, green from ground malachite, blue from lapis lazuli, black from lamp soot and metallic gold from beaten leaf. The exact shade depended on the mordant, the water and the number of dye baths, which is why no two lots matched.
No, and no digital value could be. They are careful screen interpretations chosen as design references. A natural dye shifts with the mordant, the cloth, the water chemistry and the sun, so use these as a starting point and match against a physical swatch or a Pantone reference before anything goes to production.
Because natural dyes cluster in the mid-tones. Madder, catechu, ochre and turmeric all land in a similar luminance band, which reads as rich and harmonious on cloth but leaves too little difference for body text on a screen. Keep text in the darkest ink or the lightest ground, and use the adjusted tones for anything that has to be read.
Reduce it to a single ink and look at relative luminance alone. If two colours in the motif are within roughly ten luminance points of each other they will merge into one shape, no matter how different their hues look in colour. The greyscale table here flags exactly those pairs before you cut a block.