Free Color Palette Generator

Free Tool

Color Palette Generator

Set a base colour, pick a harmony and click any swatch to copy its hex. The palette rebuilds live with every change.

The 60-30-10 rule. Let one colour dominate about 60 percent of the layout, a second support at 30, and save the boldest for the final 10, buttons, links and highlights. One dominates, one supports, one punctuates.

Your Base Colour

Live Palette

Pick

Hex code

Harmony

🎨

Pick a base colour above. Your five-colour palette appears here with hex, RGB and HSL for every swatch.

How It Works

Build a Palette in 3 Steps

Set the Base

Start from your brand colour, use the picker or paste a hex code, or hit Random for a pleasant starting point. Everything else is derived from this one colour, so the palette always belongs together.

Pick a Harmony

Switch between the five classic relationships and watch the palette rebuild. Monochromatic and analogous for calm, complementary for one bold accent, split and triadic for energy with balance.

Copy What You Need

Click any swatch to copy its hex, copy all five at once, or export the set as ready-made CSS variables, lightest to darkest, named and pasteable straight into a stylesheet.

What is a color palette generator?

A color palette generator turns one colour into a working set of five. You bring the base, usually a brand colour, and the tool derives the rest using the colour wheel relationships designers have leaned on for a century, opposites for contrast, neighbours for calm, evenly spaced triples for balance. The result is a palette that belongs together instead of five colours that happen to share a page.

The maths behind it is HSL, hue, saturation, lightness. Hue is the position on the colour wheel in degrees, so complementary means rotating 180, analogous means stepping 15 to 30 either side, triadic means jumping in thirds. Lightness moves a colour toward white or black without changing what colour it is, which is where tints and shades come from. Thinking in HSL is the single most useful habit for anyone who works with colour, and every swatch here shows its HSL alongside hex and RGB.

A palette is a business asset, not decoration. Consistent colour is a large part of what makes a brand recognisable across a website, packaging, ads and a social feed, and inconsistent colour is one of the fastest ways to look amateur. The palette also carries function, the accent colour signals what is clickable, the neutrals keep text readable, and the contrast between them decides whether visitors with weaker vision can use the site at all.

Everything happens in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged, the palette rebuilds instantly on every change, and the CSS variables export gives you the five colours named lightest to darkest, one paste from a stylesheet that stays consistent forever. Contrast is where palettes pass or fail. The swatches here pick a light or dark label automatically from each colour's relative luminance, the same green-weighted brightness measure the W3C uses. The WCAG 2.2 bar for text is a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for body copy and 3 to 1 for large text and interface elements, yet the WebAIM Million audit finds low-contrast text on more than 80 percent of home pages, so it is the single most common accessibility miss. A newer method, APCA, is being drafted for WCAG 3 and weighs font size and weight, but WCAG 2.2 remains the standard to design against today.

Written by Chirag Arora, digital marketing consultant with 17+ years of hands-on SEO experience across 500+ projects. He designed this tool and the other free tools on this site. Verify on LinkedIn.

Reference

Which harmony fits which brand?

Harmony	Reads as	Where it works
Monochromatic	Calm, premium, minimal	Consultancies, portfolios, luxury and content-heavy sites
Analogous	Soft, natural, cohesive	Wellness, food, travel, anything organic and friendly
Complementary	Bold, high-energy contrast	E-commerce and landing pages that live on one strong button
Split-complementary	Contrast with less tension	A safer first step into bold, keeps the pop without the clash
Triadic	Playful, vibrant, balanced	Kids brands, creative studios, food delivery, apps with personality
Any of them	Only as good as its contrast	Text pairs must hit 4.5 to 1, check before shipping

The honest secret of professional palettes is restraint. Most strong brands run on one hero colour, generous neutrals and a single accent, which is why monochromatic plus one complementary accent covers a huge share of real-world design. The louder harmonies are not wrong, they just demand discipline, in a triadic palette one colour still has to dominate while the other two take small supporting roles. Whatever you pick, the 60-30-10 split keeps it wearable.

Expert Tips

Use Colour Like a Professional

🎯

One Job Per Colour

Assign roles before you design, background neutral, text colour, panel colour, one accent for everything clickable. When the accent appears only on interactive elements, visitors learn the rule without thinking, and every button on the site quietly advertises itself. An accent used everywhere signals nothing.

🔍

Check Contrast Early

Test your text and background pairs against the 4.5 to 1 ratio before you build, not after. Mid-tone colours fail on both white and black, which is why palettes need a genuine light end and a genuine dark end, and it is the reason the monochromatic harmony here stretches from near-white to near-black.

📌

Write the Palette Down

A palette only creates consistency if it is recorded somewhere everyone uses, the CSS variables export here, a line in your brand doc, a saved style in your design tool. The alternative is the slow drift every old website shows, seven slightly different blues, each one eyeballed from memory.

Free Color Palette Generator

A Free Palette Generator Built From Real Brand Work

This free color palette generator builds a five-colour set from any base the moment you change it. Five harmonies cover the classic relationships, monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split-complementary and triadic, every swatch shows its hex, RGB and HSL and copies with one click, and the whole set exports as named CSS variables. There is no sign-up, no credit card and no limit on how many palettes you can build.

Colour drift is the quiet killer of brand consistency. Over 17+ years of building websites and brand presences across 500+ projects, I have audited sites running seven slightly different versions of the same blue, buttons in one shade, links in another, the logo in a third, each picked from memory by a different person in a different year. This generator exists to end that at the start, derive the whole set from one base, export it as variables, and the drift never begins.

It also fits the rest of a site build. Set your palette here, fill the layout with the free lorem ipsum generator while the content is written, compress your stylesheet with the free HTML and CSS minifier before launch, audit the finished page with the free SEO analyzer, or explore all the free SEO tools on this site.

Built by Chirag Arora
Digital marketing expert, 17+ years of hands-on SEO and content experience across 500+ projects. Connect on LinkedIn

Chirag Arora presenting content and SEO strategy at an industry event

Color Palette FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a color palette?

A color palette is the small, fixed set of colours a design uses everywhere, typically a main brand colour, one or two supporting colours, an accent and light and dark neutrals. Working from a palette instead of picking colours page by page is what makes a website, logo and social feed look like one brand. This tool builds a five-colour palette from any base colour using classic colour-wheel relationships.

What do complementary, analogous and triadic mean?

They describe where colours sit on the colour wheel relative to your base. Complementary is the colour directly opposite, maximum contrast, great for accents and buttons. Analogous colours sit next to the base, low contrast, calm and cohesive. Triadic picks three colours evenly spaced around the wheel, colourful but balanced. Split-complementary softens complementary by using the two neighbours of the opposite colour, and monochromatic stays on one hue and varies only lightness.

How do I choose which harmony to use?

Start from the mood, not the maths. Monochromatic and analogous read as calm, clean and professional, good defaults for content sites and services. Complementary gives you one loud accent that makes buttons and calls-to-action pop against everything else. Triadic and split-complementary suit brands that want energy without chaos. When unsure, pick monochromatic for the layout and add the complementary colour only for the one element you want clicked.

What is the 60-30-10 rule?

It is the classic recipe for using a palette in a layout. Roughly 60 percent of the design carries the dominant colour, usually a light neutral background, 30 percent carries the secondary colour, panels, headers, larger elements, and 10 percent carries the accent, buttons, links, highlights. The exact numbers are not sacred, the idea is, one colour dominates, one supports, one punctuates, which stops a palette from turning into confetti.

Do my colours need to pass a contrast check?

For any colour pair used as text on background, yes. The WCAG accessibility guidelines ask for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, and low-contrast text is unreadable for a meaningful share of visitors. The swatches here set their label colour automatically based on luminance, but before shipping a palette, test your actual text and background pairs in a contrast checker.

What are hex, RGB and HSL codes?

Three ways of writing the same colour. Hex is the six-character code CSS and design tools use most, like #C8963E. RGB spells out the red, green and blue components, useful in code and image editors. HSL describes hue, saturation and lightness, which is the most human way to think about colour, change lightness to get tints and shades, rotate hue to move around the wheel. Every swatch here shows all three, click any swatch to copy its hex.

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The right length and the right keywords are not opposites. I write content that covers a topic fully and targets the right terms, so it is easy for people to read and easy for Google and AI to understand.

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I started as a technical SEO trainee, not in a management seat, and I still write and edit the content myself. You get direct expertise, not a brief handed off to a junior writer.

I Built This Checker Myself

The color palette generator you just used, I built it, along with the other free SEO tools on this site. It is a direct look at how I think about clear content before you ever become a client.

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AI drafts read stiff and generic. I edit content so it reads naturally at the right level, the kind of clear, human writing that keeps readers engaged and gets quoted in AI answers.

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Color Palette Generator

Your Base Colour

Your Palette

Build a Palette in 3 Steps

Set the Base

Pick a Harmony

Copy What You Need

What is a color palette generator?

Which harmony fits which brand?

Use Colour Like a Professional

One Job Per Colour

Check Contrast Early

Write the Palette Down

A Free Palette Generator Built From Real Brand Work

SERP Snippet Preview

SEO Analyzer

UTM Parameter Builder

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a color palette?

What do complementary, analogous and triadic mean?

How do I choose which harmony to use?

What is the 60-30-10 rule?

Do my colours need to pass a contrast check?

What are hex, RGB and HSL codes?

Why Hire Me to Sharpen Your Content

Clear Writing That Still Ranks

Hands-On, Not Just Oversight

I Built This Checker Myself

Human Content in an AI World

Direct Line to Me

Content Plus the Full Picture

Results From Clearer Content

Founder

Marketing Head

Owner

Chirag Arora In The News

Speaking, Training & Building Across India

Want Content That Ranks and Converts?