Color Palette Generator
Pick a base color and get seven ready-made palettes — complementary, analogous, triadic, split-complementary, square, monochromatic, and shades & tints — plus a random palette generator with lockable swatches.
Random Palette
Five cryptographically random colors. Lock the ones you want to keep, then regenerate the rest.
How to Generate a Color Palette
- Pick a base color using the color picker.
- Seven palettes — Complementary, Analogous, Triadic, Split-Complementary, Square, Monochromatic, and Shades & Tints — generate instantly below.
- Choose a Copy Format (Hex, RGB, or HSL) to control how swatch labels display and what gets copied.
- Click any swatch to copy its color to your clipboard in the selected format.
- Change the base color anytime to regenerate all seven palettes live.
- In the Random Palette section, click the lock icon on any swatch to keep it, then click Generate New Palette to randomize the rest using a cryptographically secure random source.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between Shades & Tints and Monochromatic?
Monochromatic keeps the exact same hue and saturation and only changes lightness in even steps. Shades & Tints instead mixes your base color toward pure black (shades) and pure white (tints), which shifts saturation slightly as it approaches those extremes — a subtly different, often more natural-looking result.
How is the Complementary color calculated?
It's your base color's hue rotated exactly 180° around the color wheel, with the same saturation and lightness kept unchanged — the classic 'opposite color' relationship used in color theory.
What's the difference between Analogous and Triadic palettes?
Analogous colors sit close together on the wheel, 30° on either side of your base hue, and tend to look harmonious and low-contrast. Triadic colors are spaced 120° apart, forming an equilateral triangle around the wheel, which produces more vibrant, higher-contrast combinations.
What are the Split-Complementary and Square palettes?
Split-Complementary takes your base hue plus the two hues 150° and 210° around the wheel — the colors on either side of the true complement — giving strong contrast with less tension than a straight complementary pair. Square (Tetradic) picks four hues evenly spaced 90° apart (base, +90°, +180°, +270°), giving a bold four-color scheme with two complementary pairs.
Can I copy an individual color from a palette?
Yes — click any swatch to copy its color to your clipboard instantly, in whichever format (hex, RGB, or HSL) you have selected.
Can I copy a swatch as RGB or HSL instead of hex?
Yes. Use the Copy Format switch above the palettes to choose Hex, RGB, or HSL — every swatch label and every click-to-copy value across all palettes, including the random generator, updates to match your chosen format.
How does the Random Palette generator's swatch locking work?
Click the lock icon on any swatch in the Random Palette section to keep it fixed, then click Generate New Palette — only the unlocked swatches get replaced with fresh random colors, so you can build a palette around one or two colors you already like. Random colors are produced with the browser's cryptographically secure random number generator, not a predictable pseudo-random source.
Does this tool use real color math or just approximate the colors visually?
Real math. Every palette is generated with standard RGB-to-HSL and HSL-to-RGB conversion formulas, the same ones used in design software and CSS itself, so the hues, saturations, and lightness values are mathematically accurate.