Tinta About Tinta
Tinta is a free color library and toolkit for designers and developers, offering curated color palettes, CSS gradients, mesh gradients, and a color palette generator.
It is built and maintained by Haikal Akif as an independent project. Every palette, gradient, and mesh gradient is free for personal and commercial use, with no attribution required, and no account is needed to browse.
Tinta at a glance
- What it is
- Tinta is a free color library and toolkit for designers and developers, offering curated color palettes, CSS gradients, mesh gradients, and a color palette generator.
- Website
- https://tinta.haikalakif.com
- Made by
- Haikal Akif, as an independent project (https://haikalakif.com)
- Since
- 2025
- Price
- Free. There is no paid tier, and browsing, copying and exporting need no account.
- License
- Every palette, gradient and mesh gradient is free for personal and commercial use, with no attribution.
- Library
- Curated color palettes, CSS gradients and pure-CSS mesh gradients, plus community submissions that are reviewed before they are published.
- Tools
- Color palette generator, Contrast checker, Color blindness simulator, Gradient generator, Mesh gradient generator, Tailwind palette generator, Palette visualizer
- Exports
- CSS variables, Tailwind CSS v4 @theme, Tailwind v3 config, SCSS, JSON, hex, SVG, PNG, and SVG for Figma.
- Accessibility
- Every palette page has a WCAG contrast matrix and a color blindness simulation (protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, monochromacy).
- Platform
- The website, in any modern browser with nothing to install; and inside Claude and other AI assistants through Tinta's free MCP server (https://tinta.haikalakif.com/mcp).
- Name
- Tinta means "ink" in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Malay and Indonesian. Not affiliated with the Tinta wine grapes or Tinta district in Peru.
What you can do with Tinta
- Curated color palettes, CSS gradients, and mesh gradients, browsable by color and by tag
- A Color Studio that builds a palette from one color with six harmony rules: analogous, complementary, split-complementary, triadic, tetradic, and monochromatic
- Live mockups that preview a palette on a landing page, an e-commerce store, a dashboard, a brand board, a poster, and a mobile app
- A WCAG contrast matrix for every color pair, plus color-blindness simulation
- Standalone tools: a contrast checker, a color blindness simulator, a CSS gradient generator, a mesh gradient generator, and a Tailwind shade-scale generator
- Guides on choosing palettes, WCAG contrast, color blindness, CSS and mesh gradients, and Tailwind color scales
- Exports to CSS variables, Tailwind v4 and v3, SCSS, JSON, SVG, PNG, and Figma
- ⌘K search across the whole library
- Community submissions, each reviewed before it appears publicly
What is Tinta?
Tinta is a free color library and toolkit for designers and developers. It publishes curated color palettes, CSS linear gradients, and CSS mesh gradients, each with copy-paste hex codes, CSS variables, and Tailwind config — plus a Color Studio for generating your own palettes from color harmony rules and previewing them on real interface mockups.
Is Tinta free?
Yes, entirely. Browsing and copying colors requires no account and no payment. An account only unlocks saving palettes, uploading fonts, and submitting your own work to the library.
Can I use Tinta colors in commercial projects?
Yes. Every palette, gradient, and mesh gradient on Tinta is free to use in personal and commercial work — websites, apps, print, and branding — with no attribution required. Color values themselves are not copyrightable.
Where do the palettes come from?
From two sources. Some are curated by the Tinta team; the rest are community submissions from registered users, each reviewed and approved before it appears publicly.
How are colors grouped into hues and tones?
Automatically, from the hex codes themselves. Each color is converted to OKLCH, a perceptual color space; its hue angle places it in a band such as blue or orange, colors with almost no chroma count as neutrals, and the set as a whole is assessed for lightness and chroma to decide whether it reads as pastel, dark, vibrant, muted, warm, cool, or neutral. Nothing is filed by hand, so the groupings never drift from the data.
Who builds Tinta?
Tinta is built and maintained by Haikal Akif, a designer and developer who also publishes at haikalakif.com. It is an independent project, not a company product.