Tailwind CSS 11-color Palette Generator and API

2 min read Original article ↗

Read the launch blog post for full details on how this works.

Palette Creator

Set the initial Value as a valid hexadecimal colour. By default this is stop 500, but it can be changed to any stop from 50-950.

For colours that have 100% Saturation, make the Palette more interesting by shifting the Hue up or down.

Palettes starting from a Base colour with little Saturation get more interesting by increasing Saturation at the extremes.

Shift the Minimum/Maximum Lightness/Luminance to spread out the rest of the colours to the extremes of white and black. Switch between Lightness and Luminance to produce a different spread of colours at the extremes.

These principles are inspired by the excellent Refactoring UI book by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger. The same book recommends against automated tools, just like this one!

This tool exists to fast-track the creation of new palettes.

Palette API

Any set of Palettes can be fetched via an API. You may find this useful for design tools that need to generate a 50-950 Palette from just a single Hex value.

Currently, the API will only return a Palette using the base hex value, with no options to have HSL tweaks.

Credits

Made by Simeon Griggs

@theme {
  --color-ocean-50: oklch(0.966 0.017 247.99);
  --color-ocean-100: oklch(0.922 0.039 249.43);
  --color-ocean-200: oklch(0.843 0.082 244.51);
  --color-ocean-300: oklch(0.762 0.134 240.01);
  --color-ocean-400: oklch(0.685 0.148 237.31);
  --color-ocean-500: oklch(0.591 0.127 237.01);
  --color-ocean-600: oklch(0.504 0.109 237.7);
  --color-ocean-700: oklch(0.409 0.089 237.52);
  --color-ocean-800: oklch(0.316 0.069 237.35);
  --color-ocean-900: oklch(0.231 0.049 236.92);
  --color-ocean-950: oklch(0.176 0.038 235.69);
}

Paste this into the css file with your Tailwind config