why i built chroma collection, a design tool based off of art institute of chicago's library
jesse
most color palette tools start from nothing, you pick colors in a vacuum. i wanted something that starts from real art.
back when i was in my web dev bootcamp at msu, we had a class project where we had to build something using a free, publicly available api. the art institute of chicago came up in my research. their api is completely free, no key required, really well-documented. it hit two birds with one stone: free api + theming research all in one, plus it was close to home as i had been living in chicago for a while at the time. i didn’t end up using it for that project, but it stuck with me.
so i finally came back to it. their collection spans centuries of color theory, stuff that artists already figured out for us. why not let the masters pick your colors?
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the stack
- sveltekit
- tailwind 4
- neon — serverless postgres for shareable palette links
- gemini 2.5 flash-lite — free vision api for the “tone” mode
- art institute of chicago api — artwork data + iiif image urls
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restricted images
some artworks in the collection have restricted images (403 from iiif). the random artwork loader retries up to 10 times to find one with an accessible image. search results filter these out by checking for image_id existence.
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shareable palette links
palettes can be shared via a unique url (/palette/[uuid]). when you click “share palette”:
client sends the palette data to POST /api/palette
server generates a uuid and stores the palette + artwork id in neon
returns the shareable url, which gets copied to clipboard
the shared view page loads the palette from neon + fetches artwork info from the aic api
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-fun little detail about the site design; the ui changes color based on the palette that is generated with each new artwork.
click around and have fun. one of the little joys i’ve already gotten out of the website is learning of some art i haven’t seen that is in the institute’s collection but not on display~
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the site is available at https://chromacollection.online