From Figma-only to cross-platform: Building UI Color Palette for designers everywhere
TL;DR: Started as a Figma plugin to solve my own color accessibility struggles. Now supporting Figma, Penpot, Sketch, and Framer. Here's what I learned building a design tool as a solo indie maker.
The problem I couldn't ignore
Two years ago, I was designing a design system and kept running into the same frustration: creating color palettes that looked good AND met WCAG contrast requirements was painful. I'd spend hours checking ratios, adjusting shades, exporting to code, then realizing the exported values didn't match the design.
Every designer I talked to had the same workflow: juggle multiple tools, manually check contrast ratios, pray nothing breaks when handing off to developers.
So I built UI Color Palette. Initially just for Figma, just for me.
The pivot that changed everything
The Figma-only version got traction (thank you early users 🙏), but I kept hearing the same request: "Can you make this for Penpot/Sketch/Framer?"
Most plugin makers would say "pick one platform and go deep." But I saw an opportunity: design tools are fragmenting. Teams use multiple platforms. And color management is a universal pain point.
So I built Unoff—a cross-platform component library that lets me ship features once and deploy everywhere. It was a huge bet that cost me months of development time.
Worth it. UI Color Palette now runs on four platforms with the same codebase.
By the numbers
+80k installations
+3k registered users
+400k palettes created
+130 countries
What's working
AI color generation (launched in 5.1.0): Users can extract palettes from images or generate them with Mistral AI.
Cross-platform sync: Create in Figma, export to Tailwind, use in Framer. One palette, multiple destinations.
Community sharing: Designers are publishing palettes to the cloud and discovering others' work. It's becoming more than a tool—it's a library.
What I'm learning
Localization matters: French is live, Portuguese and Chinese are next. My Brazilian users are the 3rd largest group, yet I've ignored them for too long.
Pricing is hard: Working on a freemium model with feature credits. Still figuring out the balance between free value and paid features.
Solo building is lonely but liberating: No meetings, no consensus-building. Just ship. But also: no one to bounce ideas off at midnight when you're stuck on a gnarly bug.
If you're building design tools or tackling accessibility, I'd love to connect. Drop a comment or try the plugin via ui-color-palette.com.
