Color Pallet
Pick how many colors you want, optionally give a starting color, and get a palette built with color science. The generator works in the OKLCH color space, so the colors are spaced by how different they look to the human eye, and every swatch keeps a consistent perceived lightness and vividness. Drag on the color wheel to set the starting color; the large ring marks the seed and the small rings show where each generated color sits on the classic wheel. The eyedropper button can grab a color from anywhere on your screen in browsers that support it, such as Chrome and Edge. Click it a second time, or press Escape, to cancel without picking. On macOS the browser can only sample inside its own window until you allow it under System Settings, Privacy and Security, Screen Recording, and then quit and reopen it. Click any swatch to copy its hex code. Everything runs in your browser, nothing is sent to a server.
Nothing got picked. On macOS a browser can only read pixels from the screen once you allow it, and macOS asks again for that permission about once a month, so a picker that worked before can quietly stop.
- Open System Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Screen and System Audio Recording
- Find this browser in the list. If it is not there, click the eyedropper once so macOS adds it
- If its switch is already on, turn it off and on again, because a lapsed permission still looks enabled
- Quit the browser completely, then open it again
How It Works
Classic color theory arranges hues around a wheel and builds palettes from geometric relationships on it. Complementary colors sit 180 degrees apart, a triadic palette spaces three hues 120 degrees apart, and analogous palettes take neighboring hues in small steps. These relationships are what designers call color harmonies, and they are the rules this tool applies. For pure hue rotation the named schemes are simply evenly spaced points on the wheel, so 2 evenly spaced colors form a complementary pair, 3 form a triad, and 4 form a square tetrad. The names start to matter when you request more colors than a scheme has hues, because the extra colors then revisit the same hues at lighter and darker values instead of introducing new hues.
The interesting part is the color space where the geometry happens. The familiar HSL wheel treats hue as a plain angle in RGB coordinates, but human vision does not perceive those angles evenly, so two colors that are 120 degrees apart in HSL can differ wildly in perceived brightness. This tool rotates hues in OKLCH instead, a perceptually uniform space where equal distances correspond to roughly equal perceived differences. Every generated color keeps the lightness and chroma of the seed, so the palette looks balanced instead of pairing one neon swatch with a muddy one. For comparison, the color engine dropdown can switch the rotation to the plain HSL wheel, which reproduces the punchier but less even palettes that most online generators produce.
Some vivid OKLCH combinations fall outside what a screen can display. When that happens, the tool keeps the hue and lightness fixed and reduces chroma with a binary search until the color fits inside the sRGB gamut. The contrast rating under each swatch uses the WCAG 2.1 formula, which compares the relative luminance of the swatch against black and white text and reports the better of the two.