Use Coolors to Generate Your Brand Color Palette

Your color palette helps your brand stand out from others in your industry. Professional designers may consult the color wheel and spend hours coming up with the exact right combination of hues. Or…you could just turn to Coolors generator and come up with a ton of options in mere seconds. 

As a graphic designer, anything you can do to save time means more clients you can serve and more revenue you can bring in. The graphic design tool is a no-brainer for those wanting to start with a specific shade and find colors that complement the overall look. 

What Is Coolors?

Coolors states they’re used by more than five million designers and companies such as Disney, Warner Brothers, Netflix, Apple and Hasbro. One of the reasons for the site’s popularity lies in the fact that you can generate a random palette or grab a shade from an image you upload. 

The versatility of generating colors from numerous options makes the tool one every design should have in their pocket. Whether you create websites, make logos or do a variety of visuals, the site is an excellent place to start as you develop brand style and tweak selections already in place. 

Benefits of Using Coolors as a Graphic Design Tool

Tapping into the power of Coolors is easy and inexpensive. In a world where it costs $2,000 and up to get started in graphic design thanks to buying equipment and software, you can get started with the palette generator for free. They do offer an upgrade as your business grows, but you can gain many benefits from the unpaid option, too. 

Access it Anywhere

One of the things we love about Coolors is that you can access it from anywhere. If you want to travel the world and create designs on your phone, you can generate a color palette from any type of device that has internet access. Use your cell phone and their app or your desktop to generate design colors. 

Utilizing tools such as Coolors can be particularly beneficial to design teams. People can work in tandem to create a variety of options and then vote on which one they like best. You can even bring the client into the discussion, showing them screenshots and getting their input on the palette. 

Fast Generation

The color palette generator is fast. It returns results as soon as you hit the button most of the time. You can generate multiple options. Some people refer to the color palette wizard as a slot machine for brand styles. 

As quickly as you can hit the bar, you’ll have a new color palette. Since some might contain colors you’re avoiding, the ability to regenerate quickly is quite helpful. 

User Friendly

When you first land on the website, you see a flashing image of a color palette with five shades. The call to action (CTA) button reads “Start the Generator.” Everything from the layout to the way the user moves through the site is intuitive. Even beginners should be able to use the tool almost immediately to create color styles. 

Customizable

Source: https://coolors.co/

When you generate a random palette, you’ll be taken to a page with the shades and hex codes. You can grab the hex codes and plug them into any design tool to complete the color selection. 

However, you can also click on any of the color squares and choose a different shade in the color, making it light or darker to best suit your needs. 

Keep pressing the spacebar on the main screen to generate new palettes until you find the one you like. 

Generate from Different Sources

Something that makes Coolors stand out from some of the other free color palette generators is the ability to create a palette from an image or color code. Use Image Picker to select hues from a photo and generate palettes. You can tie your entire design to a large hero image, for example. 

If you go to Gradient Maker, you can either play around with the main color slider or you can upload a code and generate a gradient background image to mesh with the rest of your design. 

Tap Into Trends

Are you interested in trending colors and the popular designs out there? The home page offers a secondary CTA button called “Exploring trending palettes.” Selections include seasonal colors, hues people are using the most and unique ideas. You can see how much others liked the selection as they heart diffrent options. 

You can also search through the trending palettes with a color option, such as blue or red. 

Get Inspired

Coolors offers a library of over 500 color names. If you’re looking for just the right shade of red or a muted green or anything else, you’ll likely find the codes somewhere in the library. You can then generate a palette based on the main color you’ve selected. 

For example, you can choose from barn red, blood red, bittersweet shimmer, candy apple red, burgundy or carmine. Each shade has its own variation and personality. The library can help inspire you and the color palette generator can take a seed of an idea into something truly spectacular and unique. 

Should You Go Pro with Coolors?

With Coolors, you can do a lot with the free version of the graphic design tool. However, they also offer a Pro version with features such as:

• Ad free 
• Palettes with more than five colors 
• Save your palettes and organize them into projects 
• Explore over 10 million pre-selected color schemes 
• Get rid of distracting popups
• Export in PDF 
• Gain access to accessibility options, such as adjusting for color blindness Use the 
• Palette Visualizer to see how yours looks in a design
• Private profile to protect your ideas 
• Future Updates

If you plan to send PDFs to your clients for approval, you’ll want the professional upgrade as you can insert your own logo and remove any advertising from Coolors or other third parties.

The cost for Coolors Pro is $5 per month but is billed annually. Because it’s billed annually, the rate is reduced to $3 per month or $36 per year. 

The free version has no limitations like some software. You can use it without upgrading as long as you’d like or switch back and forth between the paid and free versions. Keep in mind that you will need to pay for a year at a time. The cost of Coolors Pro is low compared to most graphic design tools, so you’ll likely find it worthwhile to keep the subscription. 

If you downgrade from Pro to Free, you won’t lose your color palettes. You won’t be able to save any new ones if your space is filled, though, so you may have to delete old options. You can always save the palette to a file off Coolors and regenerate it with the codes if needed again. 

Check for Contrast

Creating a strong contrast between elements in your design can mean the difference between people staying on your website or bouncing away. Coolors offers a contrast checker to help you see what works best.

Once you’ve found a color palette you enjoy through the generator, go ahead and grab the shade you plan to use for your background and the one you want for your body text and plug them into the contrast checker. You can make adjustments as needed to keep everything readable and accessible to your users. 

The tool goes by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Following the WCAG recommendations for accessible pages ensures you have a minimum contrast ratio for highly readable designs. A lot depends on the size of your text and whether it’s bold.