Look Awesome: Solving Color Once and for All

Locking in the color palette for your project is one of those things that seems simple until you're actually doing it. Pick the wrong shade and your text is unreadable. Pick the right shade and it only works in Figma, not in your codebase, not in Tailwind, not anywhere that matters.

Dave Gandy — Font Awesome founder, Kickstarter legend, self-described Nantucket color enthusiast — has been quietly building a tool to fix this mess. It's called Look Awesome, and it tackles color from three angles at once: the technical side (WCAG contrast math), the artistic side (palettes that actually look good), and yes, the genetic side (turns out not everyone sees color the same way, and there's a 100-dot test to prove it).

This episode is an audio cut of a live demo Dave gave during the Build Awesome Kickstarter stream. He walks through how Look Awesome works, why he built it in under three weeks using modern AI tooling, and why he thinks this might be the most fun thing he's ever made. You'll also hear about NASA's brand guidelines, the color laws of Nantucket, and a binary search algorithm that finds the exact one shade of blue that satisfies both dark and light text contrast requirements.

Fair warning: this is a color tool, so if you want to actually see the thing, head over to the YouTube channel. The link is in the show notes.

What We Cover

• What Look Awesome is and why it exists
• The three challenges of color: technical, artistic, and genetic
• The Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test and what it means for working with color
• How the palette-building math actually works (including that binary search)
• Theming once and getting it everywhere — Tailwind, Web Awesome, Claude's design.md, wherever
• How Look Awesome fits into the Build Awesome workflow
• Why Dave built this in under three weeks and what AI-assisted Build Week looked like
• The Nantucket color palette demo (10 seconds, one URL)

Try It Look Awesome is live now at look.awesome.me. Dave wants to hear what's working — not just the bugs. Drop him a note at dave@awesome.me.

Want to support the broader project? The Build Awesome Kickstarter is still running at build.awesome.me.

Watch the full demo from the livestream! youtube.com/live/XBMSvupE7Bc?si=3Ow2B1I4pOAYnsb 

Credits

• Hosted, produced and edited by Matt Johnson
• Featuring Dave Gandy and Zach (from the Build Awesome livestream)
• Theme song by Ronnie Martin
• Music interstitials by Zach Malm
• Video editing by Isaac Chase

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