Building a palette
Palette mode is the one mode that’s not worked out from a seed. It holds up to 256 swatches in whatever order you put them in, and everything else in Suisai can feed it: a pick from the loupe, a harmony, colours out of a picture, a mix from the Bench.
Starting from nothing
A new window (and every window starts this way) opens as a small card with a quotation and a short list headed START FROM:
- Sample from screen, which opens the loupe
- Type or paste values: hex,
rgb()oroklch(), one per line - Extract from an image, or drop a file anywhere on the window
- Open from the Library, which tells you how many palettes it can see
Take any of them and the card grows once, to a working size, and stays there.
A harmony mode’s card offers only the first two, since a ramp is built from seeds rather than
assembled: the helper text reads Pick the first colour, the header carries the blend space and a
count, and the footer reads SEED · 0 COLOURS rather than PALETTE · 0 COLOURS.
Two views
List shows each swatch with its hex and its name beside a colour column. Tiles wraps the swatches to the width of the window.
The List/Tiles toggle appears in the footer once the list grows taller than the window, and stays while Tiles is showing. A palette that already fits is List only. There would be nothing for a grid to condense.
Both share the window’s one size. A large grid can raise the window’s floor, but switching view never moves the frame.
Opening a swatch
Click a swatch to see it in full: HEX, RGB or RGBA, HSL, LAB, OKLCH and CMYK, along with its name.
Suisai names every colour it shows. If the palette came from a file that already named the swatch, that name is kept. Otherwise the name comes from a list of 31,914, matched in OKLab so the nearest name is the one that actually looks nearest rather than the one that’s closest arithmetically.
A name you brought with you stays yours. Edit the colour and the name doesn’t move, because you named the swatch and not the value. A looked-up name works the other way round: change the colour and the name follows it, since it was only ever a description of what the colour is.
Editing in place
The editor offers RGB, HSB, HSL and CMYK sliders, a spectrum or a colour wheel, and the system colour panel. Arrow keys nudge a focused slider by one unit.
A CMYK edit warns when the colour has gone outside the printable gamut. It doesn’t stop you, it tells you.
Order
Drag a swatch to move it. The seal outline marks where it will land.
⌫ removes the open swatch, and ⇧⌘⌫ clears the palette. Undo and redo (⌘Z, ⇧⌘Z) cover every change including colour tweaks, keeping the palette’s name and whichever card was open.
Duplicates
Adding a colour the palette already holds doesn’t add it twice. Suisai says so, “#8E2B12 is already in this palette”, and reveals the swatch you already have, so you can see what it’s rather than wondering where your colour went.
Matching is on exact hex. If you genuinely want two of something, Duplicate Swatch on the context menu makes a deliberate copy.
Getting a colour out
Click the colour (the swatch itself, not the text beside it) and it goes to the clipboard in whatever format the window is set to. Hovering shows a COPY chip over the colour, so you’re never guessing whether it’s clickable. One click, no menu, and the footer flashes Copied … with what it took. The same click works on a harmony band, a tile in the compact strip, a colour card’s swatch, a row in the Library, and a recent colour in the menu bar.
And it copies two things at once: the code as text, and the colour itself as a colour. Paste into
an editor and you get #8E2B12. Paste into a colour well or a design tool and you get the colour.
You don’t have to decide which you wanted.
Right-click it for everything else:
| Copy (your chosen format) | ⌘C |
| Copy HEX Value | Always there, whatever the format is set to |
| Copy As… | Any of the thirty-six formats |
| Edit Swatch | Opens the editor |
| Send to Bench | Same as pressing B over it |
| Tear Off into a Window | A floating colour card of its own |
| Duplicate Swatch | A deliberate copy |
| Remove from Palette | ⌫ |
Or drag it. A colour dragged out of Suisai lands in anything that accepts colour data. Drop it on a shape in Affinity Designer to fill it, or on a curve to colour the outline. No copying, no format to choose.
Getting the palette out
Drag from the footer, where it reads PALETTE · 4 COLOURS, and the whole palette leaves as a
file in the last format you exported.
Or use the export button at the bottom right and choose: code and data, a palette file to share, or a PNG. Copying and exporting lists what each one writes.
Untitled palettes are numbered. One loaded from a file keeps its name and its format. See Files and formats.