Published in · 7 min read · Apr 30, 2021
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Recently I had an article about how you can explore colors on your own by starting with a subjective base color and step-by-step getting to an eye-pleasing full palette. That article was experimental and pure pleasure for some, but still many people reached out to me, mentioned being without access or knowledge of any design software. 🙃 I had to do something!!!
So I had a second thought about the topic and I decided to write an article about free color palette generators for those who want less methodology and dive straight into action, or simply doesn’t have the time / software to do so on their own. Enjoy the list, I hope it helps you out in difficult times! ⚡️
I would feel inauthentic about this list if wouldn’t start with the mother of all color generators Adobe Color. The ancestor of the new fresh-looking interface certainly warms the heart of some older designers, and I’m always smiling when someone still calls it on it’s old name during a livestream or so.
Do you have at least one color in mind? Great, Adobe Color’s color wheel is able to quickly generate a new palette out of this base color using one of the 9 different built-in color harmonies and the 4 different color modes. I often use this as a first direction before starting to refine the colors further.
I have the tendency to have some Pinterest boards about different good-looking photos (and even just colors 😜) in different topics, so when I put together my mood board for a brand or a website the theme extraction feature is pretty handy. I just upload these curated images one by one and look if something catches my eyes to use it as a palette.
If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription then you can even publish these colors into your own library to get access to them directly in Illustrator, Photoshop or so, but often I just make screenshots! 😇
Similarly to the color theme extraction, gradients are effortless to discover and extra kudos to the developers about the option to set the number of gradient stops to avoid color banding! I often stop between 4–6 though for optimal results folks.
By 2021 it’s definitely a norm to create accessible designs and not just treating as an afterthought, so I’ve found the accessibility tools really useful too. Especially the part to simulate how a color-blinded person would perceive my picked palette so differently so I can make further adjustments.
My favorite part of Adobe Color is called ‘Trends’. These are color collections basically from other designers’ work on Behance and Adobe Stock structured under categories like fashion, architecture or game design. I love browsing these for inspirations, and it’s so good it feels like cheating!
If Adobe Color was about how to engineer colors together with harmonies, then Coolors is like ‘Colors and chill’, you don’t need anything else just hit the space bar to get a new palette every time. It seems awkwardly satisfying to hit the little button on the keyboard and wait for the dopamine hit for something new to happen. Don’t misunderstand me though, I’m loving it! 💛🧡❤️💜💙💚 I can’t count the number of times I’ve discovered an interesting color with this tool just sitting on the couch with my MacBook.
The best part: you can just keep one (or multiple) color(s) from the whole range and just tirelessly hit the space bar, and let Coolors to the hard lifting for you by mix and match everything together. The way it generates the color is set to ‘auto’ by default, which I’m unsure what it means but I guess it randomly rotates between the similar color harmonies.
Looking for different shades? No problem, just select the grid looking icon by hovering the color and there you go. Especially good for creating monochromatic palettes. For tints and shades I have a tool for ya later!
Picking color from an image is not as accurate as on Adobe Color, but Coolors is beating the creative giant when it comes to test the color blindness by offering 8 different options.
Everyone is experimenting with AI these days, product recommendations in e-commerce, Netflix shows based on your previous fav series, why colors should be left out? They aren’t! Khroma is a tool and algorithm (currently in beta) which generates palettes based on your preferred colors by using artificial intelligence. All you have to do is start picking 50 of different hues and saturations for the best outcome.
After the 50 colors selected (it can be quite some time to be done TBH) the tool is training the AI model creates infinite palettes and gradients based on your favorite colors. What a machinery! 🤖 I like how Khroma is matching all my colors together and based on my current mood to get some combinations.
For me the most useful part is probably the search, where the given keywords like dark, light, muted, right, bright can all work, but it’s also great to find some pastel palettes as well. Well we also shouldn’t just pass by the nifty duotone preview with pineapples if you wish to use the colors for styling photography. 🍍
If you’re like me often inventing non-existing words, then Picular is the tool for you to match this habit with a color. Just type in the word (it doesn’t have to be invented) and within a moment you get all the color associations.
As you can see my ‘Sunbrella’ performed really well with some warm sunny colors and beach 🏖 like sand around (how it does that?!). In the background it seems the tool is matching some pictures with the search terms and then pick a dominant color from them, and it works! Kudos to the Future Memories digital agency for their work!
The reason I like the Tint & Shade generator is because with other tints and shades tools I had some bad experiences, especially with those muddy colors in the middle of the color range. What makes this tool different? It takes the math very seriously ignoring any incorrect calculation due to rounding errors, creator preferences, or other inconsistencies and it pays off!
It’s working best when you already have some base colors down, but would like complimentary colors for gradients, borders, backgrounds, shadows or other elements.
It’s also useful for designers who may be communicating color intent to developers who use Sass or PostCSS in their builds because it’s matching the calculation method of the Sass tint and shade functions. 😉
