A strip of five colours tells you surprisingly little on its own. Here is what to look for before you commit to one.
Every usable scheme has a darkest and a lightest step with a real gap between them. If all five colours sit at similar lightness, you have a mood, not a palette — you will struggle to make text and background pairs that pass.
You need at least one colour that passes on white and one that passes on black. Two is comfortable. If a palette offers none, it is entirely decorative and you will need to import a neutral from somewhere else.
Mid-tone colours are the trap. They are too light for text on white and too dark for text on black, so they end up as fills, borders and illustration — which is fine, as long as you know that going in.
Yes. Colours are not protected by copyright — a hex value is a number, not a creative work — so you are free to use any of these in commercial projects without attribution. What you cannot copy from elsewhere is an artwork, a photograph or a brand's specific trade dress; none of that applies here.
Because it is the single most useful thing to know about a palette before you start. A scheme where all five colours are mid-tone looks beautiful as a strip and is a nightmare in practice: nothing can be read on anything. The count tells you immediately how much work is left.
By hand, then measured. Each was built around a mood — a lightness range and a saturation range — with hues placed according to one of the harmony rules, then adjusted until the set had a clear dark end and a clear light end. The contrast figures are computed, not estimated.
Open a palette in the studio and add a swatch, or use the lightness ladders on the harmony page. A real product palette almost always needs more than five values — hover states, borders and tinted backgrounds all want their own step.
Not yet. This is a fixed, curated set rather than a community feed, which means quality stays consistent and every entry has actually been checked. If that changes it will be noted on this page.
