It can often be difficult to come up with distinct colour palettes off the top of your head. Whether you have a vague idea of the colour scheme you’re aiming for or are starting from scratch, visualizing colours and determining how they will work in conjunction with other colours is an inherently difficult task.
Luckily, we are living in the age of technology! There are a number of online colour palette generators that take on this task for you, and we have put together some of our favourites just for you!
Our top 3:
- Adobe colour – the Adobe Colour Palette Generator
- Canva – Colour Palette Generator
- Coolors – Colour palette generator
1. Adobe colour – the Adobe Colour Palette Generator
Right off the bat, something that stuck out to us was Adobe Colour’s attention to the customer experience. When visiting the site, Adobe Colour notes its upcoming features; an accessibility contrast checker, monochromacy tools and colour education courses. There is also a section in which visitors can suggest any other features they would like to see added to the site.
Adobe Colour offers blind safe themes which cater to three different types of colour blindness. As colour blindness affects around 8% of the population, it is great to see that Adobe Colour is both inclusive and accommodating!
Picking out a colour palette has never been easier with Adobe Colour – you can search for colours, moods or keywords using their explore feature.
To create a colour palette manually, use the 5 element colour wheel. With this feature you have full control over the RBG settings and can adjust the colour harmony rules using the left tool bar.
Another option is to upload an image with your desired colour scheme. Once you have uploaded your image you can decide whether you’d like to extract colours or a gradient.
This website also offers access to all the latest colour trends in a number of industries via platforms such as Behance and Adobe Stock. Some examples of these industries include fashion, graphic design, illustration, interaction, architecture, game design and travel to name a few. This feature will undoubtedly inspire your ideas!
Make sure to sign in with your Adobe ID account to save palettes you have created!
2. Canva – Colour Palette Generator
Operating in a slightly different way to the previous website, Canva offers a range of templates, a discover feature and a ‘learn’ feature. This feature allows you to learn a variety of skills including the ins and outs of the site itself, social media marketing and some graphic design basics. Canva also offers different packages depending on your needs. Whether you’d like to access the free features, premium features or are an educational or non-profit institution, Canva has you covered!
The site offers a range of premade templates as well as the functionality to upload your own images from which colour schemes can be extracted. Canva’s colour palette generator carefully selects the hues from your image within seconds, providing you with a number of different colour combinations and palettes. Don’t have any particular image in mind? No problem, you can choose one of the demo images available on Canva that catch your eye. You can search through premade colour palettes by either theme or colour.
Canva has a gradient colour wheel with 5 adjustable selectors that work to build your own custom colour palette. To ensure you have full control over your selections, you can also adjust the contrast and gradient compliance features to suit your preference. An added functionality is the ability to see your colour palette in action – either as a text colour, overlay or gradient.
Some other assistive tools include an information section on colour theory, a font pairer, a colour matcher and a logo and video maker that are definitely worth checking out!
It is also important to note that the site in also accommodating and sensitive to those who are colour blind. Click here to take a closer look at the Canva Colour Palette Generator.
3. Coolors – Colour palette generator
To generate a palette on Coolors, you can either start the generator or explore the thousands of pre-existing, trending palettes. The number of times that a particular palette has been saved can be seen underneath the icon, indicative of its popularity amongst creatives!
When browsing the premade palettes, you can search by colour, keyword or hex value. There is also an added option to search the palettes by what is trending, which palettes have been added most recently and which palettes are most popular. Coolors offers the functionality of either uploading a picture of your own or selecting a demo image via Unsplash from which a colour scheme will be generated.
You can also create a custom gradient, gradient palette or browse the many premade gradients available on the site. A noteworthy feature of Coolors is the contrast checker which displays your selected colour palette as a font on a background. This feature works to rate your colour combination out of 10 in regards to the effectiveness of its contrast!
In addition to these functions, Coolors offers a Google Chrome extension that you can easily add to your browser! So, make sure to get their iOS app and create an account. Once you have an account, you can sign in and create an album of your favourite palettes that you can save for later! Lastly, Coolors also offers a downloadable Adobe add-on – generating a custom colour palette has never been easier.
Make sure you also read our other articles regarding colours in design
Do you want to learn how colour has an impact on our emotions, and our emotions have an impact on our decisions and how you can use that knowledge in your branding? Then make sure you read our article about the importance of colours in branding.
We have also written an interesting article about the Colour Theory in Design. Colour theory can be regarded as a set of guidelines and rules that artists, designers and creatives generally use to aid in portraying their message, idea or concept. So if you are ready to learn more about Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Colours, make sure to read this article about colour theory.
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