How to Build a Color Wheel with Tints & Shades

I've built a handful of color pickers through the years, so when I in this book stumbled upon a color-wheel with built-in shades and tints, I had to code it:

At first, I thought: That's easy it's just a conical gradient with hard stops for the colors, and a radial gradient for the tints and shades.

But, alas, look at how un-crisp the edges in the conical gradient are (Chrome, MacOS):

So I had to do it in <svg>.

Each ring in the circle is built up by 12 circles with different colors and stroke-dasharray:

<g id="wheel">  <circle class="c3" cx="16" cy="16" r="16"></circle>  <circle class="c2" cx="16" cy="16" r="16"></circle>  <circle class="c1" cx="16" cy="16" r="16"></circle>...etc

And the CSS:

--u: calc(100 / 12);.c1 {  stroke: hsl(0, var(--s), var(--l));  stroke-dasharray: var(--u) 100;}.c2 {  stroke: hsl(30, var(--s), var(--l));  stroke-dasharray: calc(2 * var(--u)) 100;}.c3 {  stroke: hsl(60, var(--s), var(--l));  stroke-dasharray: calc(3 * var(--u)) 100;}/* ... etc */

The circles are wrapped in a <g>-tag with id="wheel", so I can use <use> (pun intended) to clone the rings:

<use href="#wheel" class="r3" /><use href="#wheel" class="r2" /><use href="#wheel" class="r1" />etc...

Each ring-class then sets a different --l (lightness) and stroke-width:

.r1 {  --l: 40%;  stroke-width: 3;}.r2 {  --l: 45%;  stroke-width: 6;}/* ... etc */

In the final result I've chosen more tints than shades, so it's not as dark as in the book-example. Firefox has issues with setting some svg-attributes in CSS, so check it out in Chrome, Edge or Safari:

Let's have some fun!

How about rotating those color rings or changing the saturation? Scroll down to see and try the controls, if they're not at the top of the Pen:

To have an automated animation, animating the --r custom property, we need to register a Custom Property:

@property --r {  syntax: "<angle>";  initial-value: 0deg;  inherits: false;}

And the animation:

@keyframes rotate {  100% {    --r: 360deg;  }}

Resulting in this (you need Chrome/Edge with Houdini):

Don't stare at it too long or you'll be hypnotized!

Thanks for reading!