Pick a seed color
Enter a hex value or use the color picker.
Color Palette Generator
Generate harmonious color palettes from any seed color, with complementary, analogous, triadic, and monochromatic schemes. Export as JSON.
Work in your browser
Local and private
Palette
How to use Color Palette Generator
Three simple steps, with your content kept on your device.
Choose a scheme
Pick complementary, analogous, triadic, split-complementary, or monochromatic.
Generate and export
Copy individual colors, copy the whole palette, or download it as JSON.
Built for useful work
Fast, focused, and made to be clear on every screen.
Five schemes
Color theory harmonies built on HSL hue offsets around your seed.
One-click copy
Copy any color or the full palette with a single click.
100% local
Palette generation runs in your browser. No color data is sent anywhere.
How to use this color scheme generator
Pick a seed color, choose a harmony rule, and the palette appears immediately. Each swatch shows a precise HEX value you can copy individually, or you can export the whole set as JSON when you want to hand it to a build step or a design token file.
Every value is computed deterministically from the seed, so the same input always produces the same palette. That makes results reproducible — you can note the seed and the rule and regenerate the exact palette later.
Everything runs locally in the browser. As a color scheme generator this means no account, no rate limit, and no record of the brand colors you were experimenting with.
How the harmony rules work
The seed color is converted to HSL, and each rule applies a hue offset around the color wheel while holding saturation and lightness steady. This is the classic color-theory construction, expressed arithmetically.
A complementary color palette uses the single hue directly opposite the seed — a 180 degree offset. The result is the highest-contrast pairing available at that saturation, which is why it reads as energetic and why it works so well for calls to action.
Triadic takes three hues at 120 degree intervals, split-complementary softens the opposite pairing by using the two hues adjacent to it, and monochromatic holds the hue fixed while varying lightness.
Choosing the right scheme
Complementary pairings are strong but easy to overuse. The usual approach is to let one of the two hues dominate and reserve the other for accents, rather than splitting the design evenly between them.
As an analogous colors generator the tool produces neighboring hues, which sit together calmly because they share visual territory. Analogous palettes suit backgrounds, illustrations, and anything that should feel cohesive rather than attention-grabbing — though they offer little contrast on their own.
Triadic is the balanced middle ground: vivid without being confrontational, and useful when you need three distinct categories to be visually separable. Monochromatic is the safest of all and works well for interfaces where color carries hierarchy rather than meaning.
From palette to CSS and design tokens
The most direct route is to paste the HEX values into CSS custom properties, giving each one a role-based name — surface, accent, danger — rather than a color name. Role names survive a palette change; color names do not.
The JSON export is designed for this. It drops straight into a design-token file or a build script, so a palette change becomes a one-line edit rather than a search-and-replace across a stylesheet.
Because the palette is derived from a single seed, changing the seed regenerates a coherent set of new values. That makes theming considerably easier than picking each color independently.
Contrast and accessibility
Color harmony and color accessibility are different problems, and a harmonious palette is not automatically a readable one. Two colors can sit beautifully together on a wheel and still fail contrast requirements when one is used as text on the other.
Hue offsets in particular do not change perceived lightness much, so a complementary pair at the same saturation and lightness often has poor text contrast despite looking dramatic. Monochromatic variations are the opposite: low hue contrast but a wide, easily checked lightness range.
The practical workflow is to generate the palette here for harmony, then verify each text-and-background pairing against WCAG contrast ratios before shipping it.
Related color tools
The Color Picker is the natural companion for choosing or fine-tuning a seed color, and for converting between HEX, RGB, and HSL notation.
The Color Contrast Checker verifies that the pairings you selected actually meet accessibility thresholds, and the Image Color Extractor pulls a seed color out of a photograph or logo when a palette needs to match existing artwork.
All of these run entirely in the browser, so a full extract-generate-verify pass keeps your work-in-progress brand colors on your own device.
Frequently asked questions
How are the palettes generated?
The seed color is converted to HSL, then hue offsets create the harmony (complementary = 180°, triadic = 120°, and so on). This is a classic color-theory approximation.
Are the colors exact?
Yes — every color is computed deterministically and shown as a precise HEX value. The harmony rules themselves follow standard color-wheel relationships.
Can I use these in a design?
Yes. Copy the HEX values into CSS, Figma, or any design tool. Monochromatic shades vary lightness while keeping the same hue.