10 Free color palette generator tools Online

Discover inspiring color combinations and learn how to make a color palette for your creative projects using these simple online generator tools

Color is a powerful design tool. It can make a room relaxing, a painting emotional, and a digital design irresistible to the eyes. But you might be wondering which tools can help you make your own digital color palettes to use in your creative work. How can you test color combinations, or expand a palette outwards from colors you already love?

Whether you want a random color palette generator or already have a hex code you want to build from, check out these ten powerful tools to make dreamy digital color schemes. Your web and app designs, fashion projects, interior designs, and digital artworks will thank you!

1. Khroma

Khroma is a free tool that uses artificial intelligence to learn your personal color preferences and then train a color generating algorithm. Start by inputting your fifty favorite colors from a large grid of squares. When you’re done, wait a minute or two for your tool to “learn” about you, then start scrolling through tailored text and background combos that are perfect for making typography choices for graphic design projects.

2. Colormind

Free deep learning website Colormind can help you find combinations of complementary colors from images you like, alongside random generations from new data each day. Click “Image Upload” to add the item you want analyzed. Instead of finding the predominant colors—as many color picker sites do—Colormind looks for those that combine well in a palette via an algorithm. You can also browse palettes previously created by other users.

3. Color Drop

If you are looking for a color palette for a logo, website, or flat design project, Color Drop is ideal. Free with some discreet ads, the website offers several tools. Browse palettes by filtering for “random”, “new”, and “popular”. Choose from their flat color spectrum to easily get hex codes. Finally, generate gradients from two colors with the code you need to add them into web projects.

4. Adobe Color

If you have a Creative Cloud account, you’ll love this free color tool from Adobe. Either use their interactive color wheel to play with color harmony rules and drag your pointers to make a custom palette, or upload an image to extract its palette or gradient colors.

Whatever you choose to save will be stored in your account and can be used with Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator via the Adobe Color theme panel or CC Libraries.

5. ColorSpace

Have one color you love but don’t know what to pair with it to create your desired effect? ColorSpace is the simplest and quickest tool on this list!

Enter a hex code or use the slider to find your preferred color, then it will generate twenty-five new palettes with it. The palettes go from high-contrast, energetic moods, to soft muted gray pairings and “classy” combinations.

6. Colorkuler

This is one for the Instagram artists, social media marketers and many others. Taking image analysis to the next level, Colorkuler can analyze your whole Instagram presence to help you plan future content.

The free version examines your latest nine images, while the $2.99 version processes your entire account and generates both a palette and a key “profile color” which you might use in graphics to give your account clear branding.

7. Color Lisa

Want to take inspiration from an iconic artist or painting? To bring the moods and atmospheres of famous pieces into your own works, try Color Lisa. Browse by artist surname and find five-color sets from the likes of Basquiat, da Vinci, Kahlo and Escher.

8. Brand Colors

Brand Colors’ website declares it is “the biggest collection of official brand color codes around”. Scroll through an alphabetical list of top international brands from fashion to airlines, and get color inspiration from their striking and sometimes surprising brand identites.

9. Coolors

Coolors is well-connected, with an app, Figma connection, Chrome extension and more. Browse popular palettes or create your own by pressing the spacebar and locking colors you love until you’ve created your own perfect palette.

When you’ve managed to pull yourself away from the addicting and seemingly endless options, you can export your palette as a URL, PDF, image and tons more formats.

10. Color Palette Cinema

Finally, for some fun inspiration, visit this Instagram account for a breakdown of colors from iconic movie scenes. Color Palette Cinema's posts play a short clip from each film and then pinpoint the key color palette that has created mood and tone. If you’re working on an illustration, comic, or even a film of your own, this is a great place to find larger palettes you can incorporate into your work.

Deepen your color theory knowledge and apply it with these resources

Learn the basic rules of using color to create powerful visual projects with top color theory courses for design, photography, and illustration. Plus, read on for more…

1. The color wheel is an important tool to get to grips with when learning any visual art. Learn about how many colors are on the color wheel.

2. Watch these seven free color tutorials to learn how to use color in a variety of ways.

3. Develop a personal color set in your sketchbook with this color palette creation course by Jazmin Varela.

4. Explore colorful screen printing techniques for clothing with this course by YUK FUN.