How To Choose A Color Palette
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HSL — the color model to think in
Color palette selection is where taste meets math. Pick well and your product, slide, or branding reads as intentional. Pick badly and every downstream choice feels off — buttons too loud, backgrounds muddy, accessibility broken. This guide covers the color-theory foundation (HSL beats RGB for reasoning), the four palette schemes that cover 95% of use cases, how to hit WCAG contrast without losing aesthetic, tools that actually produce palettes worth using, and the mistakes that signal “amateur” at a glance.
The four palette schemes — pick one and stick with it
RGB (red-green-blue) tells you what the screen does. HSL (hue- saturation-lightness) tells you what humans perceive. Reason about palettes in HSL, convert to hex/RGB at implementation time.
The 60-30-10 rule
Once you’re fluent in HSL, you can generate variants systematically: hold hue, vary lightness for shades and tints; hold lightness, rotate hue for color harmonies; drop saturation for backgrounds and borders.
Neutrals — where amateurs cut corners
Professional palettes rarely use more than 3-4 colors in any meaningful amount. A reliable distribution:
Accessibility — WCAG contrast is non-negotiable
If you find yourself using 6 equal colors, you’ve made a rainbow, not a palette. Strip back.
Semantic colors — not just aesthetic
Instead of #888888 gray, try HSL(220, 10%, 53%) — a very slightly blue-tinted neutral. Notice the difference on large surfaces.
Dark mode — not just inverting
Check every text/background pair with a contrast checker before shipping. Light gray text on white looks elegant in Figma but fails accessibility and is unreadable for users with low vision or on dim screens.
Tools that generate real palettes
Beyond brand, you need roles. Common semantic pairs:
Industry conventions — when to follow, when to break
These should live outside your brand palette so a “delete” button looks dangerous even if your brand is blue.
Common mistakes
A proper dark-mode palette is its own design, not an inverse.
Run the numbers
These are defaults, not rules. Differentiation often means deliberately choosing against the category (Mailchimp’s yellow in a SaaS world, Liquid Death’s punk black). Intentional deviation is brand strategy; accidental deviation is noise.