Colophon.
A short note about the materials of this instrument. Written in the same voice as the app, because there is no marketing department to translate it.
A small iPhone app, made on purpose.
HueAtlas is built in Swift and SwiftUI, with a hand-tuned colour-extraction pipeline and a tiny on-device labeller. No third-party SDKs, no remote dependencies. The whole binary is under three megabytes.
A printer's shelf, kept short.
Instrument Serif for display and editorial mood. Bricolage Grotesque for secondary display. IBM Plex Sans for body. IBM Plex Mono for metadata.
One accent, and no others.
Stage #0b0a09. Cream #f3ecde. A single accent — #ff4d2e — used the way a printer uses red ink: rarely, and to mean something.
A page, not a screen.
Half-pixel rules instead of card shadows. Bordered cells instead of floating tiles. The instrument is built to feel printed, even when it is glass under your thumb.
Built by one person.
HueAtlas is the work of an independent studio of one. No investors, no growth team, no roadmap pressure — only the slow accumulation of editions. Reachable, in writing, at huangchenhao2024@gmail.com.
Things this app will never do.
No accounts. No cloud upload. No analytics. No advertising SDK. No notifications you didn't ask for. No subscription. No dark patterns. If any of these change, it would be a different app, under a different name.
Made with quiet things.
Designed in Figma. Drafted in iA Writer. Built in Xcode on a small machine. Tested on a single iPhone — the one in the studio's pocket — and on borrowed devices when needed.
To the readers.
To the photographers, designers and editors who took the early editions seriously. To the people who wrote in with corrections and never once asked for a feature. The app is partly yours.
Instrument Serif & IBM Plex, on a black stage. Printed in MMXXVI. Edition the first.