Our free color palette generator builds complete, usable color schemes in seconds. Press the spacebar for a new set, lock the colors you want to keep, or type in your own brand hex and let the tool build a palette around it. Every color is checked for contrast as you go, and you can preview the whole palette the way a color blind user would see it — then export it as CSS variables, Tailwind config, SCSS or JSON.
Your palette, applied
Design systems start with color.
This is your palette on a real interface — heading, body copy, primary and secondary buttons, three cards. If it holds up here, it holds up anywhere.
What Makes a Good Color Palette?
Picking five colors you like is easy. Picking five that work together on a real interface is not.
A palette that holds up in production does three things at once. The colors share a mathematical relationship, so they feel deliberate rather than random. They spread across a range of lightness, so you have somewhere to put text, somewhere to put backgrounds, and something in between for surfaces. And they stay distinguishable for everyone who looks at them, including the significant number of people who don’t perceive color the way you do.
Most generators handle the first point and ignore the other two. That’s why palettes so often look beautiful as five bars and fall apart the moment they become a button and a paragraph of body copy.
This color palette generator was built to solve all three at once.
How to Use This Color Palette Generator
Generate a starting point. Press the spacebar, or hit the Generate button. Each press produces a fresh palette built on a color harmony rule rather than random values.
Start from your own color instead. If you already have a brand color, type its hex code straight into any swatch, or use the picker icon. That color locks automatically. Every palette you generate after that will be built around it.
Lock what you like. Click the padlock on any color to keep it. A locked color becomes the anchor for the harmony, so the remaining four are calculated from it, not from a random starting hue.
Choose a harmony rule. The dropdown lets you pick analogous, complementary, split complementary, triadic, monochromatic, warm, cool or pastel. Auto mix rotates through them.
Check it against real UI. Click “Preview on UI” to see the palette applied to a heading, body text, two buttons and three cards. This is the fastest way to find out whether a palette is actually usable.
Export it. Copy individual hex codes by clicking a swatch, or take the whole set as CSS custom properties, a Tailwind color object, SCSS variables, or JSON.
Save or share. Hit Save to keep a palette in your browser for later, or Copy link to get a URL that loads the exact palette for anyone you send it to.
Color Harmony Rules, Explained
The harmony dropdown isn’t decoration. Each rule places colors at specific angles on the color wheel, and each produces a distinctly different feeling.
Analogous uses colors sitting next to each other on the wheel. Calm, cohesive, low tension — good for content-heavy sites and anything that should feel settled.
Complementary pairs colors from opposite sides. Maximum contrast and energy. Powerful for calls to action, but use the opposing color sparingly or the design starts to vibrate.
Split complementary softens that. Instead of the direct opposite, it takes the two colors either side of it. You keep most of the contrast and lose most of the harshness — often the safest choice for a brand palette.
Triadic takes three colors evenly spaced around the wheel. Vivid and balanced, but hard to control. Let one dominate and keep the other two as accents.
Monochromatic stays on a single hue and varies lightness and saturation. Elegant, unmistakably intentional, and the easiest to make accessible because your lightness range is already spread out.
Warm and cool bias the whole palette toward one temperature. Warm reads as energetic and approachable, cool as calm and technical.
Building an Accessible Color Palette
This is where most palettes fail, and it’s the part this tool takes seriously.
Contrast is checked live. Every swatch shows its WCAG contrast ratio and grade against whichever of black or white is more readable on it. AAA means it passes the enhanced standard, AA means it passes the minimum for body text, AA large means it only passes at larger sizes, and Fail means text on that color will be genuinely hard to read. WCAG asks for at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text.
Color blindness is simulated. Around one in twelve men has some form of color vision deficiency. Switch the vision dropdown to deuteranopia, protanopia, tritanopia or achromatopsia and the entire palette re-renders the way those users see it — including the UI preview.
Clashes are flagged automatically. This is the part no other palette tool does. After simulating, the generator measures the perceptual distance between every pair of colors. If two of them collapse into near-identical values, they’re marked with a dashed outline and you get a warning telling you how many clashed.
That matters because the fix is counterintuitive. If two colors merge under deuteranopia, changing their hue usually won’t help — those hues are being flattened onto the same axis. What you need to change is lightness. A palette with a genuine spread from dark to light survives every form of color vision deficiency, because lightness is the one channel that isn’t affected.
If you’re designing anything where people have to tell states apart — charts, status indicators, form validation, maps — this check is not optional.
Where to Use Your Palette
Design systems. Export as CSS custom properties and you have a token set you can theme an entire product from. The lightness ramp maps naturally onto surface, border, muted, primary and text roles.
Tailwind projects. The Tailwind tab produces a ready colors object for your config file, so the palette is available as utility classes immediately.
Brand work. Lock the client’s existing brand color and generate around it. You get a full secondary palette that’s mathematically related to a color they’ve already approved.
Data visualization. Run every chart palette through the color blindness simulation before shipping. Charts are where indistinguishable colors do the most damage, because color is often the only thing carrying the meaning.
Color Palette Generator: FAQ
Yes, completely, with no account and no limits. Generate as many palettes as you like and export them in any format.
Yes. Type your hex code into any swatch or use the color picker icon. That color locks automatically and becomes the anchor the rest of the palette is built around. Press the spacebar to generate variations while your color stays fixed.
They’re WCAG contrast grades. AAA means a contrast ratio of at least 7:1, AA means at least 4.5:1 — the minimum for normal body text — and AA large means at least 3:1, which only passes for larger or bold text. Fail means text on that color will be difficult to read and should be avoided for anything other than decoration.
Because that’s how a portion of your audience genuinely sees it. The simulation applies standard approximation matrices for each type of color vision deficiency. If colors that looked distinct suddenly blur together, that’s a real problem in your palette, not a quirk of the tool.
Change their lightness rather than their hue. Color vision deficiencies compress certain hues onto the same perceptual axis, so two different hues at the same lightness become identical. Pulling them apart in lightness keeps them distinguishable regardless of how color is perceived.
Yes. Colors themselves aren’t subject to copyright, and anything this generator produces is yours to use in any project, personal or commercial.
In your own browser’s local storage. Nothing is sent to a server and nothing is tied to an account, so they’ll be waiting when you come back on the same device. Use Copy link if you want a palette that works anywhere.
Try Our Tools
Color Contrast Checker — test any two colors against WCAG standards
HEX to RGBA Converter — turn your palette hex codes into RGBA with alpha
UI Color Palettes — browse ready-made schemes for interfaces
Glassmorphism CSS Generator — use your palette colors in frosted-glass effects
