How to choose brand colors

A brand palette is not about finding pretty colors. It is about a small set of colors that work together and that you can use consistently. Get the roles right and the rest is easy.

The roles a palette needs

A workable brand palette is usually five colors, each with a job:

Primary. Your signature color, the one people associate with you.
Secondary. A supporting color that pairs with the primary without competing.
Accent. A brighter color reserved for the things you want people to click or notice.
Ink. A dark, slightly tinted neutral for text.
Paper. A light neutral for backgrounds.

That is enough to design a logo, a site and everything else. More colors than this usually makes your brand less recognisable, not more.

Start from one color, then build harmony

Pick or generate your primary first, then derive the rest using color harmony rather than guessing. The common harmonies are:

Analogous: colors next to each other on the wheel, calm and cohesive.
Complementary: opposite colors, high contrast and energetic.
Triadic: three evenly spaced colors, balanced and lively.

Each gives a different mood, and any of them beats picking unrelated colors by eye.

Why OKLCH matters

Older tools build palettes in HSL, where rotating the hue by a fixed amount can produce wildly different perceived brightness, which is why some palettes look muddy or uneven. OKLCH is a perceptually uniform color space: equal steps look equal to the eye. Build a palette in OKLCH and the harmonies stay balanced and the colors feel like a set.

The color palette generator on this site works entirely in OKLCH, so the swatches it gives you are even by design. It also outputs each color as a CSS oklch() value, which you can drop straight into a modern stylesheet.

Check contrast for text

Whatever your palette, text has to be readable. Dark text on your paper color and light text on your ink and primary colors should clear a comfortable contrast margin. The generator picks a readable text color for each swatch automatically, so you can see at a glance which colors carry text well.

Tie the palette to your name

If you want the identity to feel connected from the start, generate the palette from your brand name. The tool hashes the name into a starting hue, so the colors are tied to the name and are repeatable. Do not like the first result? Regenerate for a different harmony built on the same name.

A quick routine

Generate a palette from your name or a keyword.
Decide if the mood fits; regenerate for a different harmony if not.
Copy the HEX or CSS values for the five roles.
Check that text stays readable on each.

Five colors, clear roles, even harmony. That is a brand palette you can actually use.

Frequently asked questions

How many colors should a brand have?

Most brands need a primary, one or two supporting colors, an accent for calls to action, and a pair of neutrals for text and backgrounds. That is enough to build a whole identity. Too many colors makes design decisions harder and the brand less recognisable.

What is OKLCH and why does it matter?

OKLCH is a modern color space where equal numeric steps look like equal visual steps. Building a palette in it keeps the colors balanced and the harmonies clean, instead of the uneven, sometimes muddy results you get from rotating hues in older HSL color models.

Can I pick colors from my brand name?

Yes. This tool turns a name into a starting hue and builds a harmonious palette from it, so your colors feel connected to the name from the start. The same name always gives the same palette, and you can regenerate for other harmonies built on the same idea.