Color Palette Generator
Color Palette Generator — random, monochromatic, analogous, or complementary schemes. Lock colours, re-roll the rest, copy as CSS, Tailwind, or JSON. Free.
About Color Palette Generator
The Color Palette Generator gives you a working colour scheme in one click — and a fast way to refine it. Pick a mode, optionally pick a base colour, generate, lock the colours you love, re-roll the rest, and copy the result into your design tool, CSS file, or Tailwind config. It’s the same workflow used by Coolors and similar pro tools, free and with no signup.
Why a palette matters more than individual colours
Designers rarely choose colours one at a time. The colour that looks gorgeous on its own often clashes with the rest of the design once you put it in context. A palette is a small, deliberate set of colours that are guaranteed to work together — that’s what makes a brand, a website, or a slide deck feel coherent instead of accidental. Three colours done well always beats ten colours chosen one-by-one.
The four schemes, explained
Random generates four to eight colours with controlled saturation and lightness — vibrant enough to be interesting, restrained enough to never blind anyone. It’s the right starting point when you don’t have a brand colour yet and you want inspiration.
Monochromatic takes one base colour and produces a ladder of lightness values around it. Same hue, different intensities. Great for clean, minimal interfaces and editorial layouts where you want one colour to do the heavy lifting.
Analogous spreads a 60° arc of the colour wheel around your base — neighbouring hues that share a temperature. The result feels natural and unified, which is why it shows up everywhere in product brands and landscape photography.
Complementary splits the palette between your base hue and the hue directly opposite it on the wheel. The contrast is high and the energy is loud — perfect for bold consumer brands and editorial moments where you need a colour to pop.
The locked-colour workflow
The fastest path to a palette you love is iterative. Generate a fresh palette, find the one or two colours that work, click the lock icon on each, and hit Re-roll unlocked (or press Space). The locked colours stay; everything else cycles. Keep doing it until the whole palette settles. This is how working designers actually use a generator — not “one and done”, but generate-lock-reroll until the result is exactly right.
Using the palette in your stack
When you’ve got the palette, the action buttons below the strip get the colours into your codebase in one paste. Copy CSS vars drops a block of --color-1 through --color-N for direct paste into a :root block. Copy Tailwind gives you a tailwind.config.js extend.colors snippet with named palette colours. Copy JSON is for design tokens, build scripts, or anywhere you want the palette as data. Export PNG generates a clean swatch image — useful for sharing in design reviews, attaching to a Figma comment, or dropping into a brand brief.
Free, no signup, works on any device.
Frequently asked questions
A colour palette is a small set of colours — typically 3 to 6 — chosen to work together across a design. It's the foundation of any visual system: a brand identity, a website, an app, a slide deck, an illustration. A good palette has a clear primary colour, one or two supporting colours, and neutrals for backgrounds and text. Limiting yourself to a defined palette is what makes a design feel intentional instead of chaotic.
Most palettes start from a single base colour — chosen for mood, brand association, or audience — and the rest of the palette is derived from it using colour theory. Designers either build a monochromatic palette (variations in lightness/saturation of one hue), an analogous palette (hues that sit next to each other on the colour wheel), a complementary palette (hues across from each other), or a triadic palette (three hues evenly spaced). Random palettes can be a useful brainstorming starting point — pick one you like, then refine it.
A monochromatic palette uses a single hue across multiple lightness and saturation values. Think of a palette of all-blues ranging from very pale sky blue to deep navy. Monochromatic schemes feel calm and unified, which is why they're common for minimalist brands and information-dense interfaces. The trade-off is they can feel one-note — usually paired with a strong neutral (black, white, or grey) to add contrast.
An analogous palette uses hues that sit next to each other on the colour wheel — usually within a 30–60° arc. A classic example is yellow → orange → red, or blue → teal → green. Analogous palettes feel harmonious and natural because the colours share an underlying temperature. They work well for landscapes, brand systems with a warm or cool identity, and editorial illustration.