Generate harmonious five-colour palettes in one tap — random, complementary, analogous, triadic or monochromatic. Lock the colours you like and reshuffle the rest, click to copy any HEX code, and export a beautiful palette card. Browser-only, instant.
Color Palette Generator
How to use
Choose a palette mode
Pick from Random, Complementary, Analogous, Triadic or Monochromatic. Each is a colour-harmony rule that decides how the five colours relate to one another.
Hit Generate, or press Space
Each press produces a fresh harmonious palette. Don’t like it? Press again, or just tap the spacebar to reshuffle quickly.
Lock and copy
Found a colour you love? Tap its 🔓 to lock it so it stays put on the next generate. Click any HEX value to copy it (e.g. #E8622A) straight into your design.
Download or share the card
Tap “Download palette” to save the whole set as an image (with HEX codes), “Share” to send it to a teammate, or export a PDF.
Colour Palette Generator: good colours in seconds, by colour theory
Picking colours is often the part of a design where people get stuck: one colour looks fine on its own, but five thrown together just clash. This generator turns the rules behind colour harmony into a single button — it doesn’t hand you five random colours, it builds a set that is naturally coordinated by the geometry of the colour wheel. You just pick, lock and copy the ones you love straight into your design.
Five modes, five relationships
The tool offers the most-used harmony rules, each a relationship on the colour wheel: Monochromatic — one hue, varied only in lightness, the safest and most timeless; Analogous — neighbouring hues on the wheel, soft and natural, like the colours of one landscape; Complementary — two hues directly opposite, high-contrast and eye-catching; Triadic — three evenly-spaced hues, vivid yet balanced; and Random — hues let loose while keeping a clear range of lightness, for happy accidents. Switch the mode and the whole relationship changes with it.
“A good palette isn’t thrown together — it’s arranged by relationship.”
What HEX is, and why it’s everywhere
The string under each colour, like #E8622A, is its HEX code — the universal “ID card” for colour across the web, design software and almost every digital tool. It’s a # followed by six hexadecimal digits, encoding the strength of the red, green and blue channels. Click one to copy it, then paste into CSS, Figma or your slides and the colour matches exactly. Every colour this tool generates comes with its HEX, ready to use.
A quick word on contrast
Beyond looking good, a palette has to work: text needs enough contrast against its background to stay readable (the WCAG accessibility standard suggests at least 4.5:1 for body text). The HEX labels on the card automatically switch between black and white depending on how light or dark each swatch is, so they stay legible — a handy reminder to check contrast whenever you use these colours for text and background. The whole tool runs locally in your browser, instantly, uploading nothing.
10 Facts about Colour & Palettes
A HEX code encodes red, green and blue in hexadecimal, each channel 00–FF (0–255) — about 16.7 million colours in theory.
The colour wheel goes back to Newton, who in 1666 bent the spectrum into a circle — the first colour wheel, and the basis of “hue” today.
Complementary colours (opposite on the wheel) give the strongest contrast — great for sports teams and warning signs — but in large areas they’re also the most jarring.
Designers often use the “60-30-10” rule: 60% a dominant colour, 30% secondary, 10% accent — keeping a palette unified yet focused.
Human eyes are most sensitive to green, which is why luminance formulas weight green highest (about 0.72), far above red (0.21) and blue (0.07).
A monochromatic palette (one hue, varied lightness) is almost foolproof, which makes it a favourite for restrained, premium-feeling brands and interfaces.
The WCAG accessibility standard asks for at least 4.5:1 contrast between body text and background (3:1 for large text), to serve low-vision users.
Colour carries strong cultural and emotional meaning: the same red is celebration in one culture and warning in another — a palette is communication, not just decoration.
Screens use RGB (additive light) and printing uses CMYK (subtractive ink); the same HEX can look slightly different on screen versus on paper.
This tool generates palettes in HSL (hue-saturation-lightness), because rotating by “hue angle” is the most intuitive way to express harmonies like complementary and triadic.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Each swatch shows a HEX code (e.g. #E8622A). Click to copy it, then paste into CSS, Figma, Photoshop, slides or anywhere that accepts HEX — the colour matches exactly. You can also download the palette card for reference.
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Each maps to a geometry on the colour wheel: Monochromatic = one hue, varied lightness (safest); Analogous = neighbouring hues (soft); Complementary = opposite hues (high contrast); Triadic = three evenly-spaced hues (vivid, balanced); Random = hues let loose but with a clear lightness range. Switch and the whole relationship changes.
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Tap the 🔓 on a colour to lock it; the next time you press Generate, locked colours stay put and only the unlocked ones change. That lets you keep a colour or two you love and reshuffle the rest until the whole set works.
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Yes — each Generate picks a random starting colour, then derives a harmonious set by the mode you chose. Only the starting point is random; the relationships between the colours always follow colour theory, so the result is coordinated rather than chaotic.
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The tool doesn’t guarantee accessibility automatically. It does pick black or white for each label so they stay readable, but when you use the colours for text and background you should still check contrast yourself (WCAG suggests at least 4.5:1 for body text). High-contrast modes like complementary are usually safer.
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For now: keep pressing Generate, and when one colour is close to what you want, 🔒 lock it and reshuffle the rest around it. We’re also considering a “start from a base colour you enter” option.
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A high-resolution PNG showing the five swatches with their HEX values, good for sharing or archiving; a PDF is available too. The whole image is generated on your device, never via a server.
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Completely free, no signup, unlimited generations. Reshuffle as much as you like — it all runs in your browser, so it’s fast and private.
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They’re different notations for the same colour. RGB uses three 0–255 numbers for red, green, blue; HEX is RGB written in hexadecimal (#RRGGBB); HSL describes it by hue, saturation and lightness, closer to human intuition. This tool derives harmonies in HSL and outputs the universal HEX.
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No. Every palette is generated on the spot in your browser — never uploaded, written to the URL, or collected. Refresh the page and it starts over. RECATOOLS enforces zero-storage, zero-tracking.
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