Nine is a great number because it's easy to divide and makes filling in the gaps a little more straightforward. Once you've got your base, darkest, and lightest shades, you just need to fill in the gaps in between them.įor most projects, you'll need at least 5 shades per color, and probably closer to 10 if you don't want to feel too constrained. Start with a color that matches the hue of your base color, and adjust the saturation and lightness until you're satisfied. The darkest shade of a color is usually reserved for text, while the lightest shade might be used to tint the background of an element.Ī simple alert component is a good example that combines both of these use cases, so it can be a great place to pick these colors. There's no real science to this either, but it helps to think about where they will be used and choose them using that context. Next, pick your darkest shade and your lightest shade. It's important to note that there are no real rules here like "start at 50% lightness" or anything - every color behaves a bit differently, so you'll have to rely on your eyes for this one. There's no real scientific way to do this, but for primary and accent colors, a good rule of thumb is to pick a shade that would work well as a button background. Start by picking a base color for the scale you want to create - the color in the middle that your lighter and darker shades are based on. So how do you put together a palette like this anyways? Choose the base color first Instead, define a fixed set of shades up front that you can choose from as you work. That's how you end up with 35 slightly different blues that all look the same. When you need to create a lighter or darker variation of a color in your palette, don't get clever using CSS preprocessor functions like "lighten" or "darken" to create shades on the fly. If you're building something where you need to use color to distinguish or categorize similar elements (like lines on graphs, events in a calendar, or tags on a project), you might need even more accent colors.Īll in, it's not uncommon to need as many as ten different colors with 5-10 shades each for a complex UI. You'll want multiple shades for these colors too, even though they should be used pretty sparingly throughout the UI. You might also need colors to emphasize different semantic states, like red for confirming a destructive action: On top of primary colors, every site needs a few accent colors for communicating different things to the user.įor example, you might want to use an eye-grabbing color like yellow, pink, or teal to highlight a new feature: Ultra-light shades can be useful as a tinted background for things like alerts, while darker shades work great for text. Just like with greys, you need a variety (5-10) of lighter and darker shades to choose from. These are the colors that determine the overall look of a site - the ones that make you think of Facebook as "blue", even though it's really mostly grey. Most sites need one, maybe two colors that are used for primary actions, emphasizing navigation elements, etc.
True black tends to look pretty unnatural, so start with a really dark grey and work your way up to white in steady increments. Not so many that you waste time deciding between shade #77 and shade #78, but enough to make sure you don't have to compromise too much. In practice, you want 8-10 shades to choose from (more on this later). You'll need more greys than you think, too - three or four shades might sound like plenty but it won't be long before you wish you had something a little darker than shade #2 but a little lighter than shade #3. Text, backgrounds, panels, form controls - almost everything in an interface is grey. You can break a good color palette down into three categories. To build something real, you need a much more comprehensive set of colors to choose from. You can't build anything with five hex codes. Well, unless you want your site to look like this: What you actually need This calculated and scientific approach to picking the perfect color scheme is extremely seductive, but not very useful.
Ever used one of those fancy color palette generators? You know, the ones where you pick a starting color, tweak some options that probably include some musical jargon like "triad" or "major fourth", and are then bestowed the five perfect color swatches you should use to build your website?
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