The problem
Founders need a brand look long before they can hire a designer. Most palette tools hand you five pretty colors and stop there. Which one is the button? Which is the text? Can anyone read it?
What I did
- Started from a Figma Make export and set one rule for every feature: does it get a non-designer to a shippable palette faster? If not, it waits.
- Generated palettes in OKLCH across seven moods, and tuned the Earthy and Romantic moods against a benchmark of 97 real palettes.
- Gave every color a job (text, primary, supporting, accent, background) and matched it with one of 25 curated Google Fonts pairings.
- Painted a sample startup homepage in the palette, and checked every color pairing for WCAG contrast, with the smallest fix suggested when one fails.
- Built Explore: a weekly scan of 115 startup homepages showing which moods and brand colors are common right now. Curated public sites only, robots.txt respected.
- Kept it serverless. The palette, fonts, and mood live in the URL, so sharing is copying a link. Export goes to CSS variables, Tailwind, or a PNG.
Results
7moods
25curated font pairings
115startup homepages scanned weekly
0sign-ups
The coffee subscription palette above passes WCAG AA on all seven of its color pairings.
What I'd do differently
Build the benchmark before the generator. I tuned the moods against real palettes only after the first version worked. Starting with the benchmark would have set the target on day one.
Artifacts
Try Palette Generator ↗ · Source on GitHub ↗
