Brand palette generator

A brand palette is not five colours you happen to like — it is five colours that do five different jobs. Every palette this tool shuffles is built the same way a designer builds one: a deep anchor dark enough to set text on, a couple of confident mid-tones that carry the personality, a pale tint for backgrounds and cards, and one near-neutral so the whole set has somewhere to rest. That spread of lightness is what stops a palette looking like a bag of highlighters and starts it looking considered.

Restraint is the other half. Five is the ceiling, not the target — most strong brands lean on two or three of their colours ninety percent of the time and keep the rest for accents. When you shuffle, look for the two you would actually reach for first: the one you would paint a button, and the one you would set your headline in. If those two feel right together, the palette is working.

Colours are placed on a wheel by hue — an angle from 0 to 360 degrees. Harmony is just a rule for which angles to pick. Complementary takes two hues directly opposite each other (180 degrees apart) for maximum contrast. Analogous stays within a narrow slice of the wheel so the colours blend calmly. Triadic spaces three hues evenly, 120 degrees apart, for a balanced-but-lively set. Split-complementary softens a complementary pairing by using the two hues either side of the opposite instead of the opposite itself. Monochrome holds a single hue and varies only its lightness.

Picking the angles is only the start. Each hue is then given a sensible saturation and lightness so the result reads as designed rather than garish — vivid where a colour should pop, muted where it should recede, and never so dark or so washed-out that it stops being usable. That is why shuffling feels like flipping through a designer's sketchbook instead of rolling dice: the randomness is bounded on every axis.

Once you have a palette you like, the useful next step is assigning roles. The darkest colour is almost always your text and your primary button — it carries the most contrast, so it works hardest. The lightest near-neutral is your page background and the fill behind cards; it should feel like paper, not like a colour. The most saturated mid-tone is your accent: links, highlights, the one thing you want a visitor's eye to land on. Give each swatch a job and the palette stops being decoration and becomes a system.

The plus and minus controls exist for exactly this. If your chosen text colour is a touch too light to read comfortably, nudge it darker until it is. If a background tint is too heavy, lift it. Lock the colours whose roles you have settled and keep shuffling the rest until the remaining slots fall into place around them.

Some of the best brand palettes already exist — in a product shot, a landscape, a piece of packaging you love. "From a photo" reads an image you choose and works out the colours that actually dominate it, using a technique called median-cut: it treats every pixel as a point in colour space, repeatedly splits the busiest region down the middle, and averages what is left in each region into a single representative colour. The colours it returns are the ones the eye already reads as "the colours of this picture".

This happens entirely on your device. The image is shrunk to a small thumbnail in your browser's memory, sampled, and discarded — it is never uploaded, stored, or sent anywhere, and neither are the palettes you generate. Refresh the page and everything is gone. Free, no sign-up, no email, nothing leaves your browser.