Color Palette Generator
Generate a harmonious five-color palette for your startup's brand. Hit generate (or the spacebar), lock the shades you love, and copy the hex codes straight into your design tool.
Press Space to generate · click a color to copy · lock the ones you like
How to choose brand colors
A good startup palette usually has a dominant brand color, a supporting accent, and a few neutrals for backgrounds and text. This generator builds a balanced spread from a single base hue — moving through light to dark so you get usable shades for surfaces, text, and highlights rather than five colors that fight each other. Lock the ones you like and regenerate the rest until the set feels right.
Check your colors for contrast
Before you commit, make sure text stays readable on your background colors — aim for a WCAG contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for body text. A striking palette that fails accessibility will cost you users and conversions. Test your primary color against both white and dark backgrounds, since most products ship a light and dark mode.
Got your palette? Bring it to life — explore design tools and startups on Launchory, name your product with our startup name generator, and list your startup when you launch. Browse all free founder tools.
Frequently asked questions
How does this generator build a "harmonious" palette?
It picks one random base hue and one saturation, then builds five swatches at fixed lightness steps — 12%, 30%, 50%, 68%, 84% — with the hue shifting only slightly (12° per swatch) between them. That keeps every color in the same family, a spread of shades from near-black to near-white, instead of five unrelated colors.
What do the lock icons actually do?
Hover a swatch and click its lock icon to keep that exact hex when you regenerate. Locked swatches sit out of the next pass; every unlocked swatch gets a fresh color from the new base-hue draw, so you can hold onto one shade you like while cycling through options for the rest.
Is there a keyboard shortcut?
Yes — press the spacebar anywhere on the page outside a text field to regenerate. It has the same effect as clicking the Generate button, so you can spacebar through options rapidly without moving your mouse.
Can I get a specific color instead of a random one?
Not directly — this tool always starts from a random base hue rather than taking a hex input. If you have a fixed brand color in mind, generate palettes until one lands close, lock that swatch, and regenerate the rest around it.
Are the generated colors accessible or high-contrast?
The generator itself doesn't check contrast — it only spaces lightness evenly from 12% to 84%. Before shipping a palette, test your text color against your background swatches for at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio (WCAG AA for body text); the darkest and lightest swatches in a set are usually the safest text-on-background pairs.
How do I get a color into my design tool?
Click any swatch to copy its hex code, or use "Copy all" to grab all five at once as a comma-separated list. Both write straight to your browser's clipboard — nothing is uploaded or saved server-side.
Does this tool save my palette?
No — palettes exist only in the page's memory for that session. Refresh and you get a brand-new random palette; there's no history, no account and nothing stored, so copy the hex codes you want before you navigate away.
How is this different from Coolors or Adobe Color?
Same category — instant palette generation with lock/regenerate — different depth. Coolors and Adobe Color offer more controls, including color-blindness simulation, multiple export formats, and saved palette libraries behind an account. This one skips all of that for a single, fast use case: generate a harmonious five-color set and copy the hex codes, no signup.