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Colors

Color Wheel Spread Generator

Used by developers, writers, and creators worldwide.

A color wheel spread generator creates colors at perfectly equal hue intervals across all 360 degrees, so every color in your set is as visually distinct from its neighbors as possible. That's the same math behind triadic and tetradic harmony schemes, extended to any count you need. Set the number of colors, then dial in saturation and lightness to control the mood of the whole palette at once. High saturation around 75% with moderate lightness produces vivid, equally weighted colors for dashboards and charts. Pull saturation down and push lightness up and you get pastels suited for tags, background fills, and category labels.

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How to use

  1. Choose your options above
  2. Click Generate
  3. Copy your result

Detailed instructions

  1. Set the Number of Colors to match the number of categories, series, or items you need to distinguish.
  2. Adjust Saturation to control color intensity — higher values for UI elements, lower for subtle fills or backgrounds.
  3. Set Lightness to control perceived brightness — values between 45 and 60 work well for solid, readable swatches.
  4. Click Generate to produce the evenly spaced palette and preview the full color grid.
  5. Copy individual hex or HSL values directly from the output to use in your design tool or codebase.

Use Cases

  • •Generating a 8-color categorical palette for a D3.js or Chart.js multi-series dashboard
  • •Assigning distinct tag colors in a Notion or Linear project with unpredictable category counts
  • •Coloring regions on a Mapbox thematic map without any hue repetition across adjacent areas
  • •Producing HSL color tokens for a Figma design system where every role needs guaranteed visual separation
  • •Mocking up a pie or donut chart in Storybook with readable, evenly weighted slice colors

Tips

  • →For 6-color chart palettes, a saturation of 70% and lightness of 52% closely matches the visual weight of popular dataviz libraries like D3 and Vega.
  • →If you need both a primary and a lighter tint of each category color, generate twice — once at lightness 52% and once at lightness 78% — keeping all other settings identical.
  • →Avoid counts of 5 and 10 when your design uses a red starting hue, as the spread will land colors very close to common red/pink warning colors, causing confusion.
  • →For dark-mode dashboards, raise lightness to 65–70% and drop saturation to 60% so colors remain vivid without blooming on dark backgrounds.
  • →When exporting to a design system, note that the hue increment equals 360 divided by your count — you can regenerate any palette color manually by adding that value repeatedly.

FAQ

how does equal hue spacing actually work and why does it matter for charts

The generator divides 360 degrees by your chosen count and places each hue at that fixed interval — so 6 colors land at 0°, 60°, 120°, 180°, 240°, and 300°. Because the gaps are identical, no color is visually closer to one neighbor than another, which is exactly what you want for a chart legend where every series needs equal visual weight.

what saturation and lightness settings work best for UI and data visualization

For charts and dashboards on white or light-gray backgrounds, saturation between 60–80% and lightness between 45–60% produces vivid, equally weighted colors. For softer contexts like tag pills or background fills, try saturation around 40% and lightness around 75% to keep things readable without overwhelming surrounding content.

how is a color wheel spread different from just picking colors randomly

A random generator picks hues with no regard for spacing, which routinely produces clusters of near-identical colors alongside large empty gaps. A color wheel spread guarantees uniform distribution, so every color is equally different from every other — making it far more reliable whenever distinction between categories actually matters.