If you have a website, a blog, a tumblr, or an Instagram account that you approach in a semi-professional or artistic way, you might want to figure out your brand colors or create a personal color palette. It can tie everything together, make design decisions easier, and convey who you are.

I’m not a designer, and I know some of my readers are…and some of them aren’t. But you don’t have to be an artist to use the three easy, free color palette generators online that I’m going to share with you.

I have to warn you, though: these websites are SO ADDICTIVE. Clear your schedule! Especially if you like color. Whether you’re looking for something trendy, something pastel, or something classic, these sites can give you what you need.

 

 

I was interested in this recently because I wanted to refresh my blue color palette, which looked like this:

 

 

I’d used it for a few years, and I liked it! But it didn’t have particularly complementary colors for the cover of my upcoming release, which is more in the teal and turquoise range:

 

 

But here’s where I got the original color palette. I didn’t put it together myself! I just grabbed it from design-seeds.

Here, you can scroll through many, many beautiful color palettes inspired by images. Here are just a couple of examples!

 

 

 

Simply choose one you like, and the website will give you the color codes so you can use the colors on your blog or website or on Canva, which is what I use for social media graphics (Instagram and Twitter posts, Facebook and Twitter headers, and so on.)

But I wanted a color palette that would specifically complement my new release…and also work with the first book in the series:

 

 

No problem! I went to Adobe Color. On this website, you can upload an image, and in a flash, it will extract some of the exact colors from the image to create a palette.

 

How cool is that, right? If I thought it wasn’t choosing the right colors, I could move those little dots around to any place on the image.

After I did that, I chose a couple of the exact teals from the cover.

I knew I wanted a red and maybe a gold or an orange to go in the palette with it…and I wanted a purple, because I think the cover for book three will be purple. I wanted to make sure all of the colors looked good together. What to do?

I used the most addictive color palette generator of all, coolers.co.

You can use this website in a couple of ways. You can keep hitting “refresh” until you see a palette you like…and if you like a couple of the colors in a palette and not the rest, you can hit the little “lock” icon to keep these colors while finding some better companions for them. If you accidentally scroll past a color scheme you like, there’s a “back” arrow right at the top.

You can also input a color or two, like I did, and then keep refreshing until you find the coordinating colors you like for your palette.

I’m not even going to tell you how long I spent messing around with this. It’s almost like a creative videogame. I finally wound up with what I wanted: two teals, a purple, a red, and an orange, that all work together.

And then I could download it for easy use! The website gives you the hex, rgb, hsv (okay, I don’t actually know what that one is), and cmyk numbers for each color.

You might not like my palette, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s definitely not trendy, and anyway, colors are so subjective! But I love it, and it’ll work for this blog, my Instagram, and my Twitter and Facebook graphics.

I’m sure you’ll find something you adore. And if you find yourself torn between two color palettes, ask your followers on social media to vote! People love voting on things like this!

Have you ever developed a branded color palette? Do you have colors that you gravitate toward again and again? Are you a designer who has design wisdom to share? Let us know in the comments! Thanks for reading, and have a colorful day!