Color Palette Generator

What is a color palette generator?

A color palette generator helps you find a set of colors that work together — for a website, a brand, a slide deck or an illustration — without guessing hex codes one at a time. Instead of staring at a color wheel, you generate a balanced scheme in a single keystroke, keep the colors you like, and tweak the rest until the whole row feels right. Already have a photo whose colors you love? Our Image Color Palette Extractor pulls a ready-made scheme straight out of it.

The tool above builds a five-color palette with a sensible spread of lightness, so you always get a usable mix: a dark anchor, a couple of mid-tones and a light tint, rather than five colors that all sit at the same brightness. Press the space bar to generate, click a swatch's lock to keep it, and copy any color — or the entire palette — in the format you need.

The feature that makes it different is the shareable link. The palette lives in the URL, so a palette is also a web address. Send it to a teammate, paste it into a ticket, or bookmark a scheme you want to come back to, and it reopens exactly as you left it.

How to use it

1. Generate. Press the space bar or click Generate. A fresh five-color palette appears.
2. Lock what you like. Click the lock icon on any swatch. Locked colors stay put when you regenerate; everything else rerolls.
3. Pick a harmony. Use the harmony selector to bias the scheme toward Analogous, Complementary, Triadic or Monochrome relationships — or leave it on Auto for pleasant, balanced randomness.
4. Edit a swatch. Click the edit control on a swatch to open your system color picker and dial in an exact shade.
5. Copy colors. Click the hex label under any swatch to copy that single value.
6. Share the link. Click Copy share link to copy a URL that rebuilds the whole palette for anyone who opens it.
7. Export. Copy the palette as CSS custom properties, a Tailwind config block or a JSON array, ready to paste into your project.

Everything runs on your own device, so generating is instant and your colors are never uploaded.

Color harmony in plain terms

"Harmony" just means choosing colors based on their positions on the color wheel so they relate to each other on purpose rather than by accident.

• Analogous colors sit next to each other on the wheel (for example, blue, blue-green and green). They feel calm and cohesive — great for backgrounds and gentle, low-contrast designs.
• Complementary colors sit opposite each other (blue and orange, red and green). They create strong contrast and energy, which is why one complementary color often makes a perfect accent or call-to-action against the other.
• Triadic colors are spaced evenly around the wheel in a triangle. They're vivid and balanced at once, useful when you want variety without chaos.
• Monochrome schemes take one hue and vary its lightness and saturation. They're the safest way to look polished and are excellent for minimal interfaces.

Switching the harmony mode lets you feel the difference immediately: the same base hue can read as serene (analogous) or punchy (complementary) depending on which colors join it.

Building a palette you can actually use: the 60-30-10 rule

A great-looking row of swatches still needs a plan for how much of each color to use. The classic guideline from interior and graphic design is 60-30-10:

• 60% is your dominant color — usually a neutral or light background that the eye rests on.
• 30% is a secondary color that supports the dominant one and adds structure (cards, sections, headers).
• 10% is your accent — the loud, saturated color reserved for buttons, links and anything you want noticed.

Mapping a five-color palette onto this is straightforward: pick the lightest swatch as your 60%, a mid-tone as the 30%, and your most saturated swatch as the 10% accent. The remaining colors become supporting tints for borders, hovers and subtle fills. Keeping the accent rare is what makes it feel intentional — if everything is bright, nothing stands out.

A quick word on accessibility

Beautiful colors still have to be readable. Whenever colored text or a colored button sits on a background, check the contrast ratio: aim for at least 4.5:1 for normal body text and 3:1 for large text, per the WCAG guidelines. Light accents on light backgrounds, or two mid-tones together, are the usual failures.

Two habits keep palettes inclusive:

• Don't rely on color alone to carry meaning. Pair color with text, an icon or a pattern so colorblind users and people in bright sunlight aren't left guessing.
• Test the actual pairings you'll ship, not just the swatches in isolation. A color can look gorgeous in a palette and still fail as a text color.

Once you've settled on a scheme here, drop the foreground/background pairs into a contrast checker to confirm they pass before you build with them.

How the shareable link works

Most palette tools either keep your work trapped in an account or charge to export it. This one takes the opposite approach: your palette is encoded directly into the page URL — the five hex codes plus which swatches are locked. Three things follow from that:

• Sharing is just a link. No export, no file, no login. Paste the URL anywhere and the recipient sees the identical palette.
• It's private. Because the colors live in the link rather than on a server, nothing about your palette is stored or tracked.
• It's bookmarkable. Save a link and you've saved a palette. Reopen it whenever you want and pick up exactly where you left off.

That same mechanism is why each palette becomes its own page — a small, shareable artifact you control, with no strings attached.

Free, private and built for speed

There's no paywall here and no sign-up wall. Generate as many palettes as you like, lock and reroll until a scheme clicks, and export it in whatever format your project expects. To blend two of the swatches into a smooth background, hand them to our CSS Gradient Generator. The whole tool is client-side, so it's fast, works offline once loaded, and keeps your colors on your own machine. Press space, find something you love, and send the link.