About

This website was designed by, created, and is maintained by Saxon Dean. It was built for his high-school major project after sitting for years as a conceptualised but incomplete project for Practical Horse Genetics.

Saxon developed the underlying technical details, as well as the user experience and design of the site throughout 9 months of development.

Why?

We think that breeders don't need to learn genetics jargon to learn to use genetics in their breeding programs. Yes there are other coat colour calculators out there, but we wanted one that worked in our style: free of genetics jargon and with entertaining illustrations that show you what each colour could actually look like!

Artwork

The adorable artwork for this calculator was created by Watermark Creative, and they did a fantastic job with our really unusal brief. We chose a cartoon style to make sure that our horse breeders realise that the colour and markings we show are only a guide to what your foal may look like. Those foals are so cute...

Blue eyes and white markings

If a white marking gene (or combination) can cause blue eyes we show the blue eye in our illustrations. Real horses with those white marking genes may not necessarily have blue eyes. Some of the gene combinations that we show with blue eyes are based on the appearance of horses tested at Practical Horse Genetics rather than scientific publications. For example, nearly every sabino 1/tobiano horse we have tested has at least one blue eye, so the illustration has a blue eye too.

Errors

We defined the coat colour and pattern for every single genotype in this calculator. There are a lot of possibilities, and there are bound to be some that we have misclassified. If you find one please report it to us (ideally with a picture of a real horse with that genotype please) and if we agree with you that it is an error we will fix it up.

There are some limitations to what we can show so if it is a subtle detail we might not be able to correct it.