Welcome to Pinwheel

Thanks for spending some time to get more familiar with Pinwheel. Pinwheel is a Mac app for creating beautiful gradients and palettes, automating color contrast testing, converting between color formats, and it can export full design systems as code.

Creating colors, numbers, and other items #

The + button in the toolbar can be used to add colors and color sets, numbers, booleans, strings, shadows, and other items.

Grid and table view #

There’s a couple of ways to view documents. For documents with fewer colors and simpler structures, the grid view is a good choice. For more complex documents, the table view may be better, especially when using lots of groups. It’s possible to switch between grid and table view by choosing View › View Style or by pressing ⌘1 for grid view and ⌘2 for table view.

Here’s the grid view. The color format that’s shown can be changed in settings.

A screenshot of Pinwheel’s grid view

Here’s the table view. It helps when there’s long names or complex document structures.

A screenshot of Pinwheel’s table view

Quickly copy colors and items #

Colors and other items can be copied with a single click. In table mode, click on the color swatch area to copy it. This works for individual colors, or steps within a color set. In grid mode, a copy icon appears when hovering over individual colors and items to make it easy to copy. The format used when copying can be changed in settings.

Alternatively, it’s possible to select lots of colors and press ⌘C, or right click to show the context menu. Using the context menu also lets you quickly copy in lots of formats.

Color converter #

If you’d like to quickly convert a single color between different formats or color spaces, then the color converter window is the way to go. This might be handy if you’d like to change an sRGB hex value into OKLCH, for example. Or, if you’re converting colors into code for SwiftUI.

To open the color converter window, choose Window › Color Converter.

A screenshot of Pinwheel’s color converter window

Working with Figma #

Yes! Pinwheel plays nicely with Figma. Please refer to the working with Figma help page for some tips on how to integrate Pinwheel and Figma.

Please tell your friends! #

If you enjoy Pinwheel and want to help it grow, please tell all your friends about it! Your support means so much. Thank you.