Coolors: pick a color palette you'll still like next week

The spacebar workflow

Coolors' generator gives you five random colors per press of the spacebar. The trick is the lock: when one color feels right, lock it and keep rolling — the generator rebuilds the rest around it. Within a minute you have a palette built around colors you actually chose.

Five colors is not arbitrary. A workable palette needs a dominant color, a secondary, an accent, and neutrals for text and backgrounds.

Steal from images you love

Upload any photo — a landscape, a poster, a café interior — and Coolors extracts its palette. This is how professionals cheat: nature and good design have already solved color harmony, and borrowing is allowed.

Check contrast before you commit

A palette that looks beautiful can be unreadable as text on background. Use the built-in contrast checker on your text and background pairings; accessibility checkers exist precisely because the eye is a poor judge here.

Low-contrast text is the single most common DIY design mistake, and the easiest to fix before launch.

Taking the palette with you

Export as hex codes and keep them somewhere permanent — a note, your brand doc, the footer of your to-do list. Recreating a palette from memory is impossible; 'that blue' is not a specification.