Project recommendations

You’re welcome to set up documents in a way that works for you, but we have some suggestions that may help. Feel free to adopt or ignore them as you see fit.

Primitives #

Color sets are an ideal way to build gradient ramps for your design system’s primitive colors. Linear interpolation is a good starting point when blending colors, but it’s worth trying all the interpolation types to see which gives the best results. They’re all different and useful in different situations.

Semantic colors #

Color aliases are an ideal way to create semantic colors that reference a primitive color.

Testing #

If you’d like fine grain control over testing, consider creating color aliases for this purpose, and just assign those to the test group. This may be more useful than testing your color set primitive, which will result in a huge number of test results, including combinations you may not plan to use.

Naming #

Exporting can process names to ensure they conform to whatever naming style you’d like. Prefixes and suffixes can also be added as part of exporting. That means your color and group names can include capitals and spaces, if you’d like.

Light and dark appearance #

If the light and dark appearance feature of Pinwheel is used, exporting to CSS will use the light-dark() function, and exporting an asset catalog will have light and dark mode colors set up.

Namespaced groups #

Consider using namespaced groups for themes or situations where it makes sense for colors to require the name of their enclosing group.

Version control #

We recommend using Git for collaboration and version control. It may seem a little daunting for non-developers, but it’s really good, and there are lots of nice Git apps that make it easier.