How to Create a Color Palette for Your Brand or Website (2026 Guide)

A good color palette makes a brand feel intentional; a bad one makes everything look like a ransom note. The good news: you don't need a design degree — just one starting color and a few rules of color theory.

Start with one anchor color

Pick a single color that fits your brand's mood — calm blues, energetic oranges, premium purples. Everything else builds from it. Paste it into the color palette generator to instantly see its complementary, analogous and triadic partners.

The three harmonies that always work

Complementary (opposite on the wheel) gives bold contrast — great for call-to-action buttons. Analogous (neighbors) feels calm and cohesive — great for backgrounds and sections. Triadic (evenly spaced) is vibrant and balanced — great for playful brands. Pick one harmony as your scheme rather than mixing all three.

Add tints and shades for depth

A palette needs more than 3 flat colors. Generate lighter tints and darker shades of each with the shades & tints generator — these become your hover states, borders, backgrounds and disabled states, all in the same family.

Check contrast before you commit

Pretty colors that no one can read are useless. Run your text-on-background combinations through the contrast checker — aim for at least 4.5:1 for body text. This single step is what separates amateur palettes from professional ones.

The 60-30-10 rule

Use your colors in proportion: 60% a dominant neutral, 30% a secondary color, 10% an accent for buttons and highlights. Need exact HEX/RGB/HSL values to hand to a developer? The color converter translates between all three formats instantly.