What is UX Palette Generator (palettegenerator.com)?

Updated

UX Palette Generator is a browser-based tool for creating color palettes specifically for web UX/UI design. You pick a base color, choose from eight harmony methods, and the tool generates a palette you can refine, preview against a live interface, and export as CSS variables, JSON, or SVG. It's aimed at UI designers and developers building interfaces or design systems who need coordinated colors rather than a single swatch.

How it works

The workflow centers on one input: your base color.

  1. Select your base color — either pick one manually or use the random color code option. The site describes this as "the foundation" from which all palette variations are generated.
  2. Set palette size — the default shown is 6 colors.
  3. Choose a harmony method — there are 8 variants available (the site references schemes like monochromatic, triadic, and complementary in its example projects).
  4. Generate — the tool produces a palette, with options to sort by score or A–Z.
  5. Refine — adjust brightness, saturation, hue shift, and temperature with sliders. Colors you lock stay fixed while the rest shift, so you can protect the ones you've settled on.
  6. Preview — a UX preview shows the palette against white and black backgrounds, which helps catch contrast problems before you commit.
  7. Export — copy all colors or export as CSS variables, JSON, or SVG.

What you get out of it

Feature What it does
8 harmony methods Generates palettes using color-theory relationships instead of random picks
Live UX preview Shows colors on white and black backgrounds
Refinement controls Brightness, saturation, hue shift, temperature sliders
Color locking Locks chosen colors so refinement doesn't move them
Export formats CSS variables, JSON, SVG
Contrast scoring Reports a contrast score alongside balance and vibrancy metrics

The site also surfaces aggregate stats — palettes created, colors saved, exports, and a WCAG pass rate — plus a "Recent Projects" area showing example palettes (a brand refresh using a monochromatic scheme, a dashboard theme using triadic, a mobile app using complementary with AA compliance). These read as illustrative examples of what the tool produces rather than your own saved work.

Who it's for

  • UI designers building a color system for an app or site who need a full ramp, not just a primary color.
  • Developers who want palette values in a format they can paste straight into code (CSS variables or JSON).
  • Teams working on design systems where consistency across components matters and accessibility needs checking.

The combination of harmony methods plus a live preview is the practical draw: you can see how a generated palette actually behaves on an interface before exporting it, rather than judging swatches in isolation.

Practical notes

  • The tool runs in the browser, so there's nothing to install.
  • The refinement sliders are the part worth spending time on — a generated palette is a starting point, and locking your key colors before adjusting the rest keeps the palette coherent.
  • The contrast score and WCAG pass figure are useful signals, but verify final contrast against the specific text sizes and backgrounds in your own project.
  • Exporting to CSS variables or JSON is the fastest path from palette to code if you're wiring colors into a stylesheet or theme file.

If you just need a quick set of coordinated colors for a web project and want them in a code-ready format, this covers that end to end. If you need print color management or brand-guideline tooling, that's outside what the site describes.