Feeling uninspired when it comes to picking out colors for your next projects? Or maybe you’ve got one great color that you love, but can’t decide what goes best with it? Or do you have an image whose color scheme you’re obsessed with, and you want to extract those colors for your own designs? With the color palette generators and web applications on this list, you can get help with any and all of those predicaments.
Keep reading to find our curated list of the best free online resources for color palette inspiration and generation.
1. Coolors
Coolors is perfect for when you have no idea where to start. It’s a color palette generator that will throw you an infinite number of color palettes that you can use to get inspired in terms of color schemes on your next project. You can flip through the color palettes easy and quickly using your space bar, and they even let you save particular colors or color combos to go back to later.
If you’ve got one color you’re sure you want to use but aren’t sure how to go about creating a whole color palette, this is a great tool for you. Simply pick any color and choose what type of color scheme you’d like to create (such as monochromatic, analogous, complementary…there are almost a dozen to choose from), and the generator will give you plenty of color options in seconds.
3. Color-Hex
Color-Hex is a color picking tool that allows you to create your own color palettes out of the colors you choose using the color picker. Not exactly a palette generator, but you can browse other user’s palettes (of which there are hundreds) and, if you create a palette that you particular love, you can save it and let other users use it or become inspired by it.
Image palette is an awesome tool that you can use to generate several different types of color palettes based off of an uploaded image. If you’ve got an image whose colors you want to use in a project, all you need to do is upload it and four different color palettes will be automatically generated for you using colors from the image. You’ll get a light color palette based on the image’s lighter tones, a medium color palette, and a dark color palette. Also, you’ll get what’s called the “complete” color palette, which gives you all of the color options you can use based on the colors from the uploaded image.
The Material Design color palette is another one in which you choose a color and a color palette is generated for you based on the color you chose. Unlike the other similar color palette generator on this list, however, the Material Design generator lets you choose two colors — a primary color and an accents color, and creates a color scheme for you based off of those two colors. Best of all, the palette can be downloaded in several different formats so that it can be integrated seamlessly with your code.