Color Palette Generator

Color harmony is just geometry on the hue wheel: complementary colors sit opposite, analogous ones cluster, triadic and tetradic space themselves evenly. The theory is centuries old, but most generators implement it in HSL and quietly sabotage it — rotate a hue in HSL and the brightness wanders, so your "balanced" triad ends up with one color that reads much darker than the others, and the palette looks accidental. Doing the rotation in OKLCH fixes this: hold lightness and chroma, spin only the hue, and every harmony color lands at the same perceived brightness and intensity as the base. That single change is the difference between a palette that looks designed and one that looks generated.

But a harmonious set is not yet a usable palette. The classic mistake is to take five equally-weighted colors and spread them evenly across a design, where they fight for attention. Professionals apply the 60-30-10 rule — a dominant color for most of the surface, a secondary for support, and roughly ten percent reserved for a single accent that draws the eye to the action. A complementary scheme isn't "use both colors equally"; it's "one workhorse, one pop." Restraint is what reads as premium.

And harmony says nothing about legibility. Two colors can be a perfect complementary pair and still fail every contrast threshold for text. The bridge from palette to product is to expand each harmony anchor into a lightness scale, then choose the steps that pass WCAG for the specific pairings you ship — light surfaces with dark text, and vice versa. Harmony picks the hues; the scale and the contrast check make them work.

So the workflow this instrument is built for: pick a base, choose the relationship, and let OKLCH keep the family coherent — then expand the anchors in the Color Scale Generator, validate text pairs in the Accessibility Checker, and read any color in every format with the Multi-Format Converter.