Color Palette Generator: Free Online Color Scheme Tool

Harmony types

• 🎨Monochromatic — shades, tints, and tones of one hue. Safe, elegant, and versatile.
• ⚡Complementary — colors directly opposite on the wheel. Maximum contrast; great for call-to-action buttons.
• 🌿Analogous — adjacent hues on the wheel. Calm and cohesive; common in nature-inspired design.
• 🔺Triadic — three hues 120° apart. Vibrant and balanced; good for playful or bold brands.
• ✂️Split-complementary — softer alternative to complementary. Contrast without harshness.
• 🟦Tetradic — four hues at 90° intervals. Rich variety; let one color dominate to avoid chaos.

How it calculates each palette

Every palette starts by converting your base hex code into HSL. Hue is the position on the color wheel, saturation is how intense the color looks, and lightness is how close it sits to black or white. The generator holds saturation roughly fixed and shifts hue and lightness according to the harmony rule you picked. Monochromatic keeps hue and saturation constant and walks lightness up and down to produce dark, shadow, base, tint, and light variants. The others rotate hue by a fixed angle, 180 degrees for complementary, 120 for triadic, 90 for tetradic, then generate a light variant of the base and the rotated hues so the palette has enough range to build a real interface with it, not just five isolated dots on a color wheel.

Common use cases

A designer starting a new brand picks a single accent color, tries the complementary and triadic harmonies, and compares which one carries the mood they're after before touching Figma. A front-end developer building a dashboard grabs a monochromatic palette from their product's primary color, then copies the CSS variables block straight into a stylesheet to get a consistent set of five shades for buttons, borders, and backgrounds. Someone theming a personal project hits Random until a base color catches their eye, then locks it in and swaps between harmony types until the five-swatch preview looks right for a landing page.

Export formats

Click any swatch to copy its individual hex code, or use the export row below the palette to grab all five colors at once. Copy Hex Codes gives you a comma-separated list ready to paste into a design tool or spec document. Copy CSS Variables wraps the palette in a ready-to-use:root {...}block with each color assigned to --color-1 through--color-5, so you can paste it directly into a stylesheet and start referencing the variables. Copy HSL Values gives the same palette in hsl(h, s%, l%) notation, useful when you want to tweak lightness or saturation slightly by hand after copying.

Tips for better palettes

• •Start from a color that already means something to your brand or project rather than a random pick, then let the harmony rule do the rest.
• •Monochromatic palettes are the safest choice when you're not confident in your color instincts. They're nearly impossible to get wrong.
• •Tetradic and triadic palettes look best when one color dominates and the others act as accents, not four equal players competing for attention.
• •Check text contrast after picking a palette. A visually pleasing color can still fail accessibility contrast requirements against white or black text.

HSL versus hex and RGB

Hex codes and RGB values describe color as a mix of red, green, and blue light, which is exactly how a screen renders pixels but not how people usually think about color. Wanting "a slightly darker version of this blue" means editing three separate numbers in hex or RGB and hoping they still combine into the same hue. In HSL, that request is one number: lower the lightness value and the hue and saturation stay untouched. That's why this generator does all its math in HSL internally and only converts back to hex for display and export. It's also why the harmony rules work the way they do: rotating hue by a fixed number of degrees is a simple, predictable operation in HSL, and one that's much harder to reason about directly in RGB.

Building a full design system from one palette

A single five-color palette rarely covers an entire interface on its own, but it gives you a starting point for one. Generate a monochromatic palette from your primary brand color and you have a ready-made scale for hover states, borders, and subtle backgrounds, all guaranteed to read as the same hue at different lightness levels. Add a complementary or triadic palette from the same base and you have accent colors for alerts, badges, or secondary actions that contrast cleanly against your primary scale without clashing. Because every swatch traces back to the same base hue and consistent saturation, palettes generated this way tend to look more coherent than colors picked independently, even when you're choosing five or six different palettes for different parts of an interface.

Is the Color Palette Generator free?

Do I need an account?

What is a hex color code?

What is HSL and when should I use it?

How do I use the palette in my CSS?

What is the difference between complementary and split-complementary?