Material Color Utilities - Rust

A Rust port of Material Color Utilities.

Rust Port Highlights

• Perfect Parity: Tested against millions of combinations of color, contrast, scheme, and dark/light modes. Every output matches the reference Kotlin implementation exactly.
• 2026 spec: Includes the 2026 color spec, and CMF scheme which were added recently.
• No panics: Safe Rust code. No unwrap, expect, or panic used in the library.
• Performance: Faster than Kotlin reference, while being thread safe.
• Concurrency: Built to be thread-safe for use in multithreaded apps.
• Efficiency: Cached where possible to allow for nearly free recalculation of colors. ~30 ns to resolve already-calculated roles
• Minimal dependencies: Optional feature flags let you pull in extra functionality only when you need it for helper functions.

Color is a powerful design tool and part of the Material system along with styles like typography and shape. In products, colors and the way they are used can be vast and varied. An app’s color scheme can express brand and style. Semantic colors can communicate meaning. And color contrast control supports visual accessibility.

In many design systems of the past, designers manually picked app colors to support the necessary range of color applications and use cases. Material 3 introduces a dynamic color system, which does not rely on hand-picked colors. Instead, it uses color algorithms to generate beautiful, accessible color schemes based on dynamic inputs like a user’s wallpaper. This enables greater flexibility, personalization, and expression, all while streamlining work for designers and teams.

Material Color Utilities (MCU) powers dynamic color with a set of color libraries containing algorithms and utilities that make it easier for you to develop color themes and schemes in your app.

Capabilities Overview

The library consists of various components, each having its own folder and tests, designed to be as self-contained as possible. This enables seamless integration of subsets into other libraries, like Material Design Components and Android System UI. Some consumers do not require all components, for example, MDC doesn’t need quantization, scoring, image extraction.

Cargo Features

The library uses Cargo features to control dependencies and functionality. All features are enabled by default.

Dynamic Colors vs. Materialized Themes

This library provides two primary ways to work with Material color schemes:

1. Dynamic Colors (DynamicScheme): Performs color calculations on the fly. This is the most efficient approach for production UI as it only calculates the specific color roles you actually use.
2. Materialized Themes (MaterializedTheme): Generates a full set of both Light and Dark schemes beforehand. This is useful when you need to serialize the entire theme (e.g., to JSON) or when you want a simple, pre-computed object containing all color values.

Both approaches are powered by the same underlying Material Design algorithms.

Usage Example

The easiest way to generate a theme is using the theme_from_color helper:

use material_color_utils::theme_from_color;
use material_color_utils::utils::color_utils::Argb;

let source_color = Argb::from_hex("#4285F4").unwrap();

// Generate a full materialized theme (Light + Dark schemes)
let theme = theme_from_color(source_color)
.variant(Variant::Vibrant)
.call();

println!("Light Primary: {:?}", theme.schemes.light.primary);
println!("Dark Primary: {:?}", theme.schemes.dark.primary);

Learn about color science

The Science of Color & Design - Material Design

Try it out

Material Theme Builder

We recommend incorporating the Material Theme Builder Figma plugin and web tool into the design workflow. With them, designers can easily experiment with different dynamic color themes and see how they transform their designs with just a few clicks.