What is Color Palette Generator?
The Color Palette Generator is a free online tool that helps designers, developers, and creatives build cohesive color schemes in seconds. You can start from a single base color and let the tool generate complementary, analogous, triadic, split-complementary, or monochromatic palettes based on established color theory principles. Alternatively, you can explore randomly generated palettes for inspiration and lock individual colors while regenerating the rest. Each color in the palette is displayed with its HEX, RGB, and HSL values, making it easy to transfer your choices into CSS, design tools, or brand guidelines. The tool also evaluates contrast ratios between colors so you can quickly identify accessible text-background pairings that meet WCAG standards.
Why Use Color Palette Generator?
Color is one of the most impactful elements of any visual design, yet choosing colors that work together harmoniously is a skill that takes years to develop. The Color Palette Generator encodes centuries of color theory into a simple interface, allowing anyone to produce professional-quality palettes without specialized training. Developers building design systems benefit from mathematically precise harmony rules that ensure consistency across components. Marketing teams can rapidly prototype brand palettes and share them with stakeholders for approval. The built-in contrast checker prevents accessibility pitfalls by flagging color combinations that fail WCAG AA or AAA guidelines, saving you from costly remediation later in the project lifecycle.
How to Use
Enter a base color using the color picker or type a HEX code directly. Select a harmony rule — complementary, analogous, triadic, split-complementary, or monochromatic — to define how the palette is calculated. The tool instantly generates a set of five coordinated colors. You can lock any color you like and regenerate the unlocked ones. Adjust saturation and lightness with the fine-tuning sliders to dial in the exact mood you want. When your palette is ready, export it as a CSS variables snippet, a JSON object, or copy individual color values to your clipboard.
Example Usage
A startup founder needs a brand color palette for their new SaaS product. They enter their primary brand color '#2563EB' and select the split-complementary harmony rule. The tool produces five balanced colors spanning blue, warm amber, and soft coral. They lock the primary blue, tweak the amber slightly warmer, and regenerate the remaining accents. The final palette is exported as CSS custom properties and added directly to their Tailwind config. A UI designer uses the same tool to explore monochromatic palettes for a dark-mode theme, generating five shades of slate gray and verifying that each meets WCAG AA contrast against white text.
Benefits
The generator supports all major color formats — HEX, RGB, and HSL — so output is immediately usable in any workflow. Harmony rules rooted in color theory guarantee aesthetically pleasing results without trial and error. The contrast ratio checker promotes accessibility from the start, reducing the need for post-design audits. The lock-and-regenerate feature lets you iterate quickly while preserving colors you have already approved. Everything runs client-side with no data sent to external servers, and the tool is completely free with no usage limits.