Color Hunt
A community-curated, four-swatch palette gallery — the fastest way to get unstuck on color.
Color Hunt is an open community palette gallery: every palette is four swatches, every palette is upvoted, and the result is a continuously sorted feed of color combinations that look good together. It's the design equivalent of a clean bookmark drawer.
The facts.
The shape of the tool.
Founded by Gal Shir and Pawel Gola, Color Hunt has run on the same idea for almost a decade: constrain the format, let the crowd vote, surface what works. You don't pick colors one at a time; you pick a palette of four. You don't tune for taste; you pick the palette that landed most votes that week, or that decade.
The constraint is the feature. Four swatches is enough to suggest a system — usually one dark, one light, one accent, one neutral — without forcing you to think about WCAG contrast ratios at minute one. The trade-off is that the palettes are decoupled from semantics. Color Hunt doesn't tell you which swatch is 'primary,' which is 'surface,' or which is 'on-brand.' Translating a Color Hunt palette into a usable design token system is on you.
For brand exploration, mood boards, and one-off marketing sites, that's fine — it's faster to start from a palette that has been collectively validated than to start from a blank color picker. For product UI, treat Color Hunt as a starting frame: build out tints and shades, validate accessibility, and translate into a 9-step or 12-step scale before you ship.
Use it on the official site.
What it actually does.
- Four-swatch palette format for fast scanning and decision-making
- Upvote-driven sorting (Hot, New, Popular, Random, Collection)
- Tag filtering: Pastel, Vintage, Retro, Neon, Gold, Light, Dark, Warm, Cold, etc.
- One-click copy of any HEX value, or copy the full palette as a CSS-ready snippet
- Save palettes to your account for later
- Dark/light preview swatches so contrast is immediately readable
- Free, no rate limit, no account required to browse
When designers reach for it.
- 01Brand identity exploration
When the brief is loose, Color Hunt is a good first pass: filter by mood (Vintage, Neon, Pastel), screenshot five palettes, and present as directional. The vote count gives you cheap social proof.
- 02Marketing landing pages
Indie SaaS landing pages live or die on color confidence. A four-swatch palette mapped to background, surface, ink, and accent gets you 80% of the way to a credible page.
- 03Hackathon and weekend project starters
When the actual product matters more than the design system, a Color Hunt palette plus a Google Font pairing covers the visual surface area in under five minutes.
- 04Mood boarding for client kickoff
Three to five Color Hunt palettes, each tagged with the mood, makes a credible mood board in Figma without sourcing photos.
A working sequence.
- 01Filter by the mood the brief asks for
If the brief says 'warm and editorial,' use the Warm tag plus Vintage. If it says 'fintech, trustworthy,' use Cold plus Dark. Filtering early narrows the decision space.
- 02Pick three candidate palettes
Don't try to evaluate fifty. Three is enough to feel the difference and not so many that you tune out.
- 03Test the palette in context
Drop the four HEX values into a Figma frame with real type, a real headline, a real button. Color reads completely differently in context than as swatches.
- 04Expand to a usable token system
Generate tints and shades (Tailwind's 50-950 scale or 9-step variants in Figma). The four Color Hunt swatches become the 500 step of four color ramps.
- 05Validate accessibility
Check ink-on-background and ink-on-surface for AA contrast (4.5:1 for body, 3:1 for large text). Half of Color Hunt palettes fail this test out of the box — that's normal, it's a starting frame.
- 06Lock as design tokens
Encode in Figma variables and CSS custom properties. Once the palette is in tokens, you can iterate the rest of the design without losing color discipline.
Who it fits.
- Indie designers
- Solo founders
- Brand identity exploration
- Marketing landing pages
- Hackathon and prototype work
The balance.
- Free, fast, no account needed to browse
- Vote-driven curation surfaces actually-good palettes
- Filter tags map to design briefs cleanly
- Constraint of four swatches forces decision-making
- Palettes are not tagged with semantics — you decide what's primary
- No accessibility guarantees; many palettes fail AA contrast for body text
- Four swatches is rarely enough for production UI tokens
- No way to lock a brand color and find complements against it
FAQ
Can I use Color Hunt palettes commercially?
Yes. Colors themselves aren't copyrightable. The palettes on Color Hunt are crowd-submitted, free to use, and don't require attribution. Treat them as inspiration, not trademarked assets.
Are Color Hunt palettes accessibility-safe?
Not always. Many popular palettes fail WCAG AA contrast (4.5:1 for body text). Always validate ink-on-background and ink-on-surface combinations before shipping — a pretty palette that fails contrast is a liability.
How is Color Hunt different from Coolors or Adobe Color?
Color Hunt is gallery-first; Coolors and Adobe Color are generator-first. Color Hunt shows you palettes other people made and voted for; Coolors helps you generate your own from scratch or a single seed color. They serve different stages of the process.
Can I create a palette on Color Hunt?
Yes. Free accounts can submit palettes; the community votes them up or down. Successful palettes tend to have one dark, one light, one accent, and one neutral, with strong contrast between paired swatches.
Does Color Hunt export design tokens?
No. It gives you four HEX values. Translating those into a 9- or 12-step ramp, semantic tokens (surface, ink, accent, etc.), and a usable Tailwind or Figma variables file is on you. Tools like uicolors.app and Tailwind Color Generator can help.
Or look at the others.
- FontjoyA neural-network font matcher that proposes display-and-body pairings in one click.→
- FigmaThe browser-based design tool that ate the industry — UI, prototyping, design systems, and dev handoff in one file.→
- CodePenA browser-based front-end playground for prototyping, sharing, and learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.→
- Can I UseThe browser-support reference for every CSS, HTML, and JavaScript feature shipped on the web.→
Last reviewed: 2026-05 · 7 tools in the Web Design Awards directory