Color Shades Generator

What is Online Color Shades Generator?

Color Shades Generator is a free online tool for generating a color palette from shades of a color. You can set the step size and step count for your needs easily.

If you are working on a user interface (UI) design or coding a website, it is better to use shades of a color instead of using random colors to provide a more holistic view for users. If you define these colors as parameters in your theme and use them on your project, it will provide consistency between your pages. Otherwise, it will become hard to control your color palette.

Color Palette with Shades of Gray

Using lighter or darker shade of a color may be useful on hover effects, box-shadows, borders and on many UI elements since it gives a more natural look on the design as well as all elements looks complementary and become a piece of a puzzle.

How to use Online Color Shades Generator?

For generating color shades and creating color palettes from a reference color, following these steps will be helpful.

1. Select your reference color which will be lighten and darken to generate all shades.
2. Set darken/lighten ratio that will be applied in each step. Lower the value, closer the colors.
3. If you want lower or higher number of colors in your color shades palette, you can change step count. For example, if you set it to 3, it will generate 3 lighter and 3 darker colors by referencing the main color.
4. You can copy each color individually or copy them as a color array. Also, details will be listed if you click on any color from the list.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a tint and a shade?

A tint is the colour mixed towards white, a shade mixed towards black. A generated ramp gives you both, which is what you need for hover states, borders, backgrounds and disabled styles that all belong to the same colour.

What do step size and step count control?

Count is how many swatches you get; size is how far apart they are. Few large steps give you a short, high-contrast ramp; many small ones give a smooth gradient of near neighbours.

Why build a ramp instead of picking colours individually?

Consistency. Hand-picked hover and border colours drift off the hue and the interface slowly stops looking like one thing. A ramp from a single source keeps everything related by construction.

How many shades does a design system need?

Nine or ten per colour is the common answer, which is enough for backgrounds, borders, text and states without producing steps nobody can tell apart.

Where do I start from?

The Image Color Extractor will pull a base colour out of a photo, and the AI Color Palette Generator suggests a whole scheme.