Create balanced five-color palettes for websites, branding, UI design, and creative projects. Choose a color harmony, lock the shades you like, check contrast, preview color blindness, and export your palette to CSS, Tailwind, JSON, SVG, or PNG.
Free to use. No signup or download required.
Start with one base color and build related colors around it using a color harmony. You can then lock the swatches you want to keep, regenerate the others, test contrast, and export the finished palette for your website, brand, or UI project.
Color harmony describes how colors relate to each other on the color wheel. The right harmony depends on whether your design needs strong contrast, subtle variation, visual consistency, or a wider range of distinct colors.
Found a color that works? Lock it before generating again. Only the unlocked swatches will change, which lets you refine a palette gradually instead of starting from scratch after every generation.
Open any palette color to inspect the values you may need for design or development. Copy individual formats directly, explore lighter tints and darker shades, and use the same color consistently across different tools and workflows.
An accessible palette needs more than attractive swatches. Text, buttons, links, form controls, icons, and other important interface elements must remain readable and distinguishable against their backgrounds.
For WCAG 2.2 contrast guidance, normal text generally needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for Level AA, while large text needs at least 3:1. Level AAA uses a higher 7:1 ratio for normal text.
Minimum contrast: 4.5:1
Minimum contrast: 3:1
Minimum contrast: 7:1
Colors that look clearly different to one person may appear much more similar to someone with a color-vision deficiency. Preview the complete palette before using color differences for navigation states, charts, buttons, badges, alerts, or other important interface elements.
Move your final colors directly into design and development workflows instead of rebuilding the palette manually. Copy developer-ready variables or download visual formats for documentation, handoff, and sharing.
A useful website palette gives every color a clear job. Start with a small set of core colors, then expand them into lighter and darker variations only when the interface needs them.
There is no fixed number for every website. A good starting point is a small core palette with clearly defined roles rather than many unrelated colors.
Once the core palette works, create lighter and darker variations for hover states, focus states, borders, disabled controls, backgrounds, and other interface requirements.
Test combinations in real buttons, text, navigation, forms, cards, and backgrounds before deciding that a palette is finished.
Use these common design directions as a starting point, then adjust the colors and contrast for your own brand, interface, and accessibility requirements.
A useful starting direction for dashboards, SaaS products, and modern web interfaces.
A warm direction for lifestyle brands, editorial designs, and creative projects.
A high-contrast starting point for dark dashboards, apps, and developer-focused products.
A softer visual direction for illustrations, landing pages, and friendly brand systems.
Use the real product workflow below to see how a palette moves from a starting color to harmony generation, refinement, accessibility checks, detailed color values, and production-ready export.
The full workspace combines harmony generation, contrast checking, and a linked gradient preview so a finished palette can move straight into gradients, exports, and implementation workflows.
Start with a harmony family such as Square, Complementary, Triadic, or Analogous, then compare the resulting five-color palette with its color-blindness simulation before committing to a direction.
Use the wheel, HEX input, eyedropper, and base-color refinement controls for brightness, saturation, hue shift, and temperature so locked palette colors stay aligned with your intended direction.
Before exporting, users can verify foreground and background readability, confirm AA and AAA states, and inspect how the current palette blends inside the linked gradient editor.
The detail view surfaces formats like HEX, RGB, HSL, LAB, LCH, OKLCH, and more, then extends the chosen swatch into lighter tints and darker shades for production handoff.
Generated supporting colors help users expand beyond the original five swatches while the base color info panel gives a focused place to inspect the source color and jump into a deeper detail page.
A useful palette should move easily from color exploration into real design work. Refine your core colors, build shade scales, extract colors from visual references, or turn your palette into production-ready gradients.
Quick answers about creating color palettes, choosing color harmonies, checking accessibility, locking colors, and exporting palettes for web, branding, and UI projects.
It helps you create a group of colors that work well together for websites, branding, UI design, illustrations, presentations, and other visual projects.
Start with a base color, choose a harmony such as complementary, analogous, triadic, monochromatic, split-complementary, or tetradic, then generate related colors around it. Lock the colors you like and regenerate the remaining swatches.
Most websites work best with a small core palette. Start with primary, secondary, accent, background, surface, and text colors, then create lighter or darker variations for hover states, borders, disabled elements, and other UI needs.
Check the contrast between foreground and background colors, test important text and controls, preview common color-vision deficiencies, and avoid using color alone to communicate important information.
Use complementary colors for strong contrast, analogous colors for a softer connected look, triadic colors for balanced variety, monochromatic colors for consistency, and split-complementary or tetradic palettes when you need a broader range of hues.
Yes. Lock any swatch you want to keep and regenerate only the unlocked colors until you find a combination that works for your design.
Yes. The palette generator includes simulations for protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, and achromatopsia so you can compare how your colors may appear with different forms of color-vision deficiency.
Yes. You can export your finished palette as CSS variables, Tailwind config, SCSS, JSON, SVG, PNG, and other formats for design and development workflows.
Start with one color, explore different harmonies, lock your favorite swatches, check contrast, and export the finished palette when it is ready.
Open Free Palette GeneratorFree to use. No signup required.