Colour Palette Generator by Style

12: Corporate trust, Cottagecore, Cyberpunk, Earthy organic, Fintech India, Indian heritage, Kids playful, Luxury gold, Medical clean, Monsoon India, Scandinavian, Y2K. Pick one at the top of the tool; the page link updates (for example ?v=corporate-trust) so you can bookmark or share that exact view.

The AA target is 4.5:1 for normal body text and 3:1 for large text and UI components; switching to the AAA target raises body text to 7:1. These come from WCAG 2.1 success criteria 1.4.3, 1.4.11 and 1.4.6, and each generated colour is reported with its measured ratio so you can see the margin.

A warm off-white or cream base, one or two muted greens (sage and a deeper moss), a soft red-purple berry, a clay or dusty rose, and a honey or wheat warm. Saturation stays low — usually under about 50% — which is what gives the faded, sun-bleached feel.

WCAG 2.1 asks for 4.5:1 for normal body text, 3:1 for large text (18pt, or 14pt bold, and above) and 3:1 for UI components and graphical objects; AAA raises body text to 7:1. Saturated red and deep violet are the usual failures on near-black and need a lightness lift.

Colours in the hue range of natural iron-oxide and clay pigments: ochres and siennas around 14-46°, umbers in the same range but very dark and low in saturation, and green earth around 96-124°. They are characterised by moderate saturation — roughly 15-55% — rather than by being simply brown.

Blue, indigo and teal dominate financial interfaces because they read as institutional and low-arousal, and users have decades of banking exposure to them. What matters more than the hue is discipline: one brand colour with a full tonal ramp, a strictly separate set of money-semantic colours, and no decorative accent that shares a hue with credit or debit.

Historically from plants, insects, minerals and earth: indigo from fermented Indigofera tinctoria leaves, red from Rubia cordifolia madder root or Kerria lacca resin, yellow from turmeric or ochre clay, green from ground malachite, blue from lapis lazuli, black from lamp soot and metallic gold from beaten leaf. The exact shade depended on the mordant, the water and the number of dye baths, which is why no two lots matched.

Because contrast depends on relative luminance, not on how vivid a colour looks. A saturated yellow has a luminance close to white, so on a white or off-white page it lands near 1.5:1 — far under the 4.5:1 WCAG asks for body text. Darkening the same hue to roughly 28% lightness brings it past 4.5:1 while keeping it recognisably yellow.

Deep, low-lightness neutrals: near-black, charcoal, midnight navy, espresso brown and very dark green. Keeping the ground under roughly 15% lightness lets a mid gold clear the 3:1 contrast ratio WCAG asks for on large text and interface borders, which is what makes the gold read as metal rather than mustard.

A near-neutral base — clinical blue, teal or slate at low saturation — for everything structural, so the only saturated colour on screen carries clinical meaning. Reserve red for critical, amber for abnormal, green for within range, blue for informational and a desaturated slate for awaiting result, and never let a decorative accent share a hue with a status.

It depends entirely on how bright the photo is behind the words. White text over a mid-tone street photo may need only a few percent of black, while the same text over a bright overcast sky typically needs around 40% to reach 4.5:1, and over half that again to reach 7:1. Measure the region the text actually sits on rather than the whole image.