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I reverse-engineered Discord's profile banner color blend (and built a tool around it)

The problem

Discord Nitro lets you set a profile theme color. Simple enough — except the banner Discord actually shows you isn't the hex you picked. It's blended roughly 40% toward black or white depending on the color's brightness, and there's no documentation on the exact formula and no in-client preview.

So people were doing the obvious thing: pick a color, upload, check, adjust, re-upload, repeat.

Figuring out the blend

I sampled a range of theme colors against their rendered banners and worked backward to the blend ratio and direction (toward black for brighter colors, toward white for darker ones, roughly a 40% mix). Once I had that matched, the rest was just wrapping it in something usable.

What I built

A small browser tool:

  • Paste a hex → see the real banner color live
  • Pull a color suggestion from an avatar
  • Look up a user ID against public bot data
  • Download a matched solid PNG banner

React + Vite frontend, no backend accounts, self-hosted on a small VPS. No signup, no paywall.

Try it: https://blancodagoat.dev/discord/

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's dealt with reverse-engineering undocumented platform behavior before — curious how close my approximation is to Discord's actual formula.

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