How to Choose a Color Palette

1. Start with One Color

Every great palette starts with a single anchor color. This is usually your brand's primary color or the dominant emotion you want to convey. Pick a color that resonates with your project's purpose — blue for trust and professionalism, orange for energy and creativity, green for growth and health.

Use Kulr's Color Picker to explore colors visually with the HSB canvas, or browse 175+ named colors for inspiration.

2. Understand Color Harmony

Color harmonies are combinations that feel naturally balanced. They're based on positions on the color wheel:

• ComplementaryTwo colors opposite each other (e.g., blue + orange). High contrast, energetic.
• AnalogousThree colors side by side (e.g., blue + blue-green + green). Harmonious, calming.
• TriadicThree colors equally spaced (e.g., red + yellow + blue). Vibrant, balanced.
• Split-CompOne color + two adjacent to its complement. Softer than complementary.
• MonochromaticVariations of a single hue (tints, shades, tones). Elegant, cohesive.

Kulr's Palette Generator lets you generate palettes in all these harmony modes with one click.

3. Use the 60-30-10 Rule

The 60-30-10 rule is an interior design principle that works perfectly for digital design:

• 60% — Dominant color (backgrounds, large surfaces)
• 30% — Secondary color (cards, sections, navigation)
• 10% — Accent color (CTAs, highlights, active states)

This ratio creates visual hierarchy without overwhelming the eye. Your Palette Visualizer lets you preview exactly how these proportions look on real UI templates.

4. Consider Mood and Context

Colors carry psychological weight. Warm colors (red, orange, yellow) feel energetic and urgent. Cool colors (blue, green, purple) feel calm and trustworthy. Pastels feel soft and approachable. Neons feel modern and bold.

Match your palette's mood to your audience. A children's app needs different energy than a financial dashboard. Kulr's generator includes mood filters — warm, cool, pastel, neon, earthy — to narrow your options fast.

Explore our Color Psychology guide for deeper insights on how colors affect perception.

5. Always Check Accessibility

A beautiful palette is useless if people can't read the text. WCAG 2.1 requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Approximately 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some form of color vision deficiency.

Run every color combination through Kulr's Contrast Checker and test with the built-in color blindness simulator before shipping. Accessibility isn't optional — it's a legal requirement in many jurisdictions.

6. Extract from the Real World

Nature, photography, and art are the best color inspiration. Found a sunset photo with perfect tones? A product shot with the vibe you need? Drop it into Kulr's Image Color Extractor and get a palette in milliseconds. The K-means clustering algorithm finds the dominant colors automatically.

7. Test on Real UIs

Colors look different in context. A purple that looks great in a swatch might feel too intense on a full-page background. Always test your palette on realistic mockups — dashboards, landing pages, mobile screens — before committing.

Kulr's Visualizer shows your palette on 6 different UI templates so you can see exactly how it performs in production.