Welcome to Paleta: A Colour Studio in Your Browser

Colour is one of those things that looks easy until you try to do it on purpose. You know the green you want. You just can't say it in numbers, or pair it with a second colour that doesn't fight it. That gap — between the thing you see in your head and the five swatches on your screen — is the whole reason Paleta exists.

We made this because the tools we kept reaching for were either toys or cockpits. A cute button that spat out random colours and taught you nothing. Or a giant dashboard with forty sliders and a login wall. Neither felt like a place to actually make something. So we built a small set of calm rooms instead, each one doing a single job, then quietly passing you to the next. Think of this as a note from the makers, and a short walk through the house.

Start with a colour you actually love

Every good palette begins with one colour you mean. Not a committee colour. A real one.

Maybe it's already in front of you — the rust on an old bicycle, the exact blue of a friend's kitchen tiles, a frame from a film you can't stop thinking about. If it lives in a photo, drop that photo into the Image Extractor and it hands back the colours hiding in the pixels. If it lives on a website you admire, the Code Extractor lifts every colour straight out of the page's styling. And if you can only see it — no file, no name — open the Picker and chase it by eye, nudging until it clicks, with suggestions and a little history trailing behind you.

One colour. That's the seed. Everything after this grows from it.

Grow one colour into a family

A single colour is lonely. It needs relatives — colours that agree with it without being copies. This is where most people freeze, and it's the part Paleta most wants to make joyful.

Feed your seed into Harmonies and watch it throw off complementary, analogous and triadic sets, each one a different mood for the same starting point. Want two colours to meet in the middle? The Mixer blends them in even, walkable steps, so you can pluck the exact halfway shade you didn't know you needed. And when you just want to be surprised, hit the Palette Generator — ten fully-formed palettes per click, made to be scrolled through fast until one stops you.

Found something with promise? Move it into the Palette editor, where you can push each swatch lighter, darker, warmer, cooler, until the whole row feels inevitable. Need the same colour spoken in another language — HEX for a stylesheet, oklch(0.7 0.15 25) for a modern one, CMYK for the printer? The Converter translates any colour between formats without losing the plot. And for the colours that live between two others, the Gradients tool builds a smooth blend and hands you the CSS to copy.

Test it in the real world before you commit

Here's the hard truth. A palette that looks stunning as five squares can fall apart the second it becomes an actual thing people read and click. Swatches lie. Context tells the truth.

So try it on. The Typography room drops your colours behind real headings and body text, so you can see whether that gorgeous grey is still readable at paragraph size. The UI Preview throws the palette onto buttons and cards — the places colour actually has to work for a living. And the Contrast Checker gives you the one number that matters for readability, then offers a tuned shade when a pairing falls short. Somewhere around one in twenty men can't reliably separate your red from your green, so this room isn't optional. It's kindness, made measurable.

Keep the good ones. Reuse them everywhere.

You did the work. Don't lose it to a closed tab.

When a palette earns its place, favourite it and it lands on your Saved shelf, waiting for the next project instead of the mental trash. And when colours graduate from "pretty" to "part of a system," the Design Tokens room lets you name them by the job they do — primary, surface, danger, muted — and export the set so a colour means the same thing everywhere it appears. That's the moment a palette stops being decoration and becomes infrastructure.

Common questions

Do I have to use the tools in order?

No. The order above is a story, not a rulebook. Some days you'll start in the Picker and never leave. Other days you'll walk the whole path, seed to system. Wander however you like — every room hands off cleanly to the others.

Is Paleta really free?

Yes. Nothing to install, no account to make, no trial that expires and mugs you for a card number. Open a tool and start playing.

I know nothing about colour theory. Can I still use this?

Especially then. The tools carry the theory so you don't have to memorise it — you just react to what looks right. Curiosity is the only prerequisite.

That's the house. Fourteen small rooms, one quiet idea: colour should be a thing you play with, not a thing you fight. Pick a door and push — the Palette Generator is a lovely place to start, and you're two clicks from a palette you'll want to keep.