Color Palette Generator — build harmonious palettes online

A good palette isn't about colors that simply look nice — it's about colors whose relationships hold up. Professional designers rarely throw random hues together; they start from angle relationships on the color wheel (the HSL hue circle). Analogous colors (hues about 30° apart) are naturally calm and unified, great for steady interfaces. Complementary colors (180° apart) create strong contrast, ideal when you need something to grab attention. Triadic colors (an even 120° apart) balance energy and harmony — a common choice for brand colors. Design Cat's generator picks colors by exactly these harmony rules, so every set it produces is grounded, not noise.

Hue alone isn't enough — the rhythm of lightness and saturation matters just as much. A palette that ages well usually follows the 60-30-10 rule: 60% a dominant color (often a low-saturation background or large block), 30% a secondary color, and 10% an accent reserved for buttons, links and key numbers. If all five colors are maxed out on saturation, the screen gets harsh and the hierarchy collapses. Dial back the background's saturation and let only the accent stay vivid, and the whole thing instantly reads more refined. Press Space to roll a few sets, lock the dominant color you like, then fine-tune the rest to approach this balance.

The last step is shipping it to code and accessibility. Once you have a palette, check the contrast between text and background — body text should hit at least WCAG AA's 4.5:1, or light text on a light background becomes unreadable in sunlight. Design Cat lets you copy a HEX list or export :root CSS variables in one click, so the palette becomes design tokens baked into your project; later theme changes mean editing variables, not hunting hex codes. It all runs locally in your browser — no upload, no sign-up, no limits — so you can generate and ship straight into a real project.