Random color generator

• Any picks red, green and blue values completely at random from 0 to 255. Any of the 16.7 million colors can come up, which means plenty of muddy browns and grays as well as bright hues.
• Pastel picks a random hue with medium saturation and high lightness: soft pinks, mints, lavenders and baby blues.
• Vivid uses high saturation and medium lightness for bold, punchy colors.
• Dark gives deep, low-lightness shades such as navy, forest green and burgundy.

Pastel, Vivid and Dark choose the hue at random from the whole color wheel and keep saturation and lightness in a range, which is why they look consistent.

Generate up to 12 colors at a time. Each click replaces the whole set, so copy any color you want to keep before you click again. If you're looking for a background, Pastel and Dark tend to give the most usable results; Vivid is better for accents, buttons and highlights.

Every color is shown in three formats, each with its own copy button:

Hex is just RGB written in base 16: 3A = 58, 86 = 134, FF = 255. HSL describes the same color as hue (0–360° around the color wheel), saturation and lightness, which makes it easy to create lighter or darker variants by changing one number.

The color code on each swatch is drawn in black or white, whichever has better contrast with that color. It uses the relative luminance formula from the WCAG accessibility guidelines, so you can see at a glance whether a color works better with dark or light text.

• Design inspiration: break out of your usual palette. Generate a batch, keep the ones you like and build from there.
• Placeholder colors for charts, avatars, tags and UI mockups.
• Games and art prompts: draw or paint something in the color you get.
• Teaching color theory: compare hex values with the colors they produce.
• Testing: check how a component looks with arbitrary background colors.

To turn a color you like into a matching set of harmonious colors, use the color palette generator.

Colors are generated with your browser's cryptographic random generator and nothing is saved, so copy the codes you want to keep. Colors can look slightly different on different screens, especially between phones and uncalibrated monitors. For print work, check colors on a proof, because screens use RGB while printers use CMYK.