Although it looks deceptively like a plain old list of colors, the color palette in Hexels 2 has got a few tricks up its sleeve.

“Organize your mind, organize your life.”

While Hexels can’t tell you where you put your keys or what time dinner is, its palette can help you organize your mind.  Colors can be dragged and dropped anywhere on the palette, and even copied if you hold alt.  Or you can double-click to add the currently selected color anywhere you want.  Double-click again to edit the new color swatch.

Automatic Gradients

Do you find it somewhat tedious to carefully pick eight evenly spaced colors between salmon and magenta?  Then we have the solution for you!  Hexels allows you to create gradients right on the color palette by dropping one existing color onto another color in the same row or column.  Hexels will even create multi-color gradients that hit every color it finds along the way.

Space Travel

….Color spaces, that is.  Click the little gear icon at the lower right of the palette and you can select HSV gradients.  Behold!

Creating vertical gradients between the two takes just a few seconds and gives us a nice color selection.

Import and Export Photoshop Palettes

The heading says it all.  Hexels can import .aco palettes from Photoshop as well as export back to the format.  Hexels 2.55 even added support for importing Lab color (i.e. yellow, black, and chocolate), so all your bases should be covered.

So next time you fire up Hexels, take a new look at that plain-looking empty grid.  You could even draw a picture there!