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Colors

5-Color Palette Generator

Used by developers, writers, and creators worldwide.

A 5-color palette generator built on real color harmony rules gives designers something most random palette tools skip: mathematically related colors. Choose complementary, triadic, analogous, or tetradic harmony and the generator spaces hues the way a trained colorist would. Lock the base hue to your brand's existing value — say, 210 for corporate blue — and the remaining four colors fill in automatically. Five colors hit a practical sweet spot. You get slots for a primary, secondary, accent, background neutral, and text tone without the overhead of managing a full token system. Hex values are ready to paste into CSS variables, Figma styles, or Tailwind config the moment the palette generates.

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How to use

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

Detailed instructions

  1. Select a harmony rule from the dropdown — start with Complementary for high contrast or Analogous for softer, related tones.
  2. Enter a base hue between 0 and 359 if you have a brand color to match, or leave it at -1 to let the generator pick randomly.
  3. Click Generate to instantly produce a five-color palette displayed as a grid with hex codes.
  4. Copy each hex value directly into your CSS file, Figma color styles, or design tool's color picker.
  5. Regenerate as many times as needed — same settings produce fresh lightness and saturation variations each run.

Use Cases

  • •Anchoring a SaaS product palette to an existing logo hue in Figma
  • •Generating a triadic color set for an editorial magazine print layout
  • •Building a dark-mode UI theme with harmonious accent and surface colors
  • •Exploring tetradic palettes for a festival or event brand identity
  • •Rapid-testing analogous schemes for a low-contrast analytics dashboard

Tips

  • →Run the same base hue through all four harmony rules back-to-back to compare which palette structure suits your project's energy level.
  • →Analogous palettes rarely produce enough contrast for accessible text — always pick your darkest slot for body copy and check it with a WCAG tool.
  • →For brand presentations, generate three complementary palettes at the same base hue and show clients options before committing to one.
  • →Tetradic results can look chaotic — pick one dominant hue for 60% of your surfaces and use the other three sparingly as accents.
  • →If you need a neutral-heavy palette for a dashboard, generate an analogous set and desaturate two of the five colors manually in Figma after importing.
  • →Lock the base hue to a competitor's primary color (find it via their CSS) to see how a harmony-based palette differentiates your brand from theirs.

FAQ

what's the difference between complementary and triadic harmony

Complementary harmony pairs two hues directly opposite on the color wheel — high contrast, bold, attention-grabbing. Triadic spaces three hues 120 degrees apart, giving more color variety with less jarring contrast. For brand work, complementary suits strong contrast needs; triadic fits projects that need visual richness without clashing.

how do I find my brand's base hue number to use in the generator

Open your brand color in Figma, Photoshop, or any hex-to-HSL converter and read the H value from the HSL output — it's a number between 0 and 359. Enter that value in the Base Hue field and the generator anchors the palette to your existing color.

do generated color palettes pass WCAG accessibility contrast requirements

Not automatically — harmony rules optimize for aesthetic relationships, not contrast ratios. After generating, paste foreground and background hex pairs into WebAIM's contrast checker or Figma's Contrast plugin. WCAG AA requires at least 4.5:1 for body text; analogous palettes often need a darker text slot to pass.