Color palette tools

Color is often the first thing people remember about a brand, and it is easy to get wrong. A palette that looks good as five swatches can fail on a real website, where text needs enough contrast to read and buttons need to stand out from the page. The tools here help you build palettes, preview them on layouts and check them against accessibility guidelines.

Coolors and Adobe Color generate palettes from a starting color, an image or a color rule, and let you lock the colors you like while you shuffle the rest. Paletton builds schemes from the color wheel. Khroma and Huemint use machine learning: Khroma learns which colors you like and suggests combinations, and Huemint generates palettes and previews them on sample brand graphics.

Realtime Colors applies a palette to a sample website so you can see your colors on headings, buttons and backgrounds before a designer builds anything. The WebAIM Contrast Checker tests a text color against its background using the WCAG contrast levels. Run every text and background pair your brand will use, including white text on your main brand color, which often fails.

For print you also need color values that printers understand. Pantone Connect gives access to Pantone's color libraries for matching spot colors, and most brand guidelines list each color as a Pantone reference, CMYK values for print, and RGB and hex values for screens. Screens and printers show color differently, so order a printed proof before a large print run.