Fall color palettes
Six autumn schemes, each one five colors, every hex copyable in a click. Ordered dark to light so you can read the structure rather than guess it.
Autumn palettes are the easiest seasonal scheme to reach for and the easiest to get wrong. The failure is almost always the same: four colors that are all mid-tone, all warm and all roughly as saturated as each other, which reads as mud rather than as October. What makes these work is one genuinely dark anchor (an oxblood, a bark brown, a near-black olive) holding down three warmer mid-tones, with a single pale straw or bone to open it back up.
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Woodsmoke
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Harvest table
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Oxblood and straw
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Late orchard
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Moss and rust
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Ember
The hue doing the work here is orange, but the ones that survive on a screen are the ones pulled toward red or toward yellow rather than sitting on pure orange, which vibrates unpleasantly against white and fails contrast at almost any text size. If you need an autumn accent for a button or a link, take the darkest color in the row rather than the most autumnal-looking one, then check it: a rust at #C1440E clears 4.5:1 on white, the ochre beside it does not come close.
Other palettes.
Same format, different mood. Every hex on every one of them copies in a click.
- Winter color palettes Two families that behave nothing alike: quiet blue-grays, and forward jewel tones.
- Spring color palettes Fresh greens and blossom pinks, kept from going saccharine by one dark leaf green.
- Summer color palettes Sea blues, sun yellows and coral, with a deep blue doing the structural work.
- Pastel color palettes Soft schemes that each break the pastel rule once, because five pastels have no hierarchy.
- Neutral color palettes Warm and cool neutrals. Not gray: every color carries the same faint hue bias.
- Retro color palettes Four decades kept apart, because mixing them is what makes retro read as wrong.
All thirteen palette collections · Pull a palette out of an image · Check a pair for contrast
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