Retro color palettes
Six schemes across four decades, five colors each, every hex copyable in a click.
Retro is not one look, it is at least four, and the fastest way to make a retro design feel wrong is to mix them. The seventies are burnt orange, harvest gold and avocado at low lightness. The fifties are mint, coral and cream at high lightness. The eighties are saturated magenta and cyan on near-black. The nineties are flat primaries with a lot of white. Each row below stays inside one decade for that reason.
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Seventies kitchen
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Avocado and gold
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Diner mint
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Atomic
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Arcade
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Cassette
What actually signals a period is rarely the hue: it is the lightness and the saturation together. Seventies palettes are dark and desaturated; fifties palettes are pale and chalky; eighties palettes are dark grounds with two very saturated accents and nothing in between. If a scheme is not reading as the decade you meant, that pairing is almost always where it has gone wrong, not the choice of orange. One more period detail worth copying: genuine mid-century palettes almost never use pure white: the lightest color is a cream or a bone, and swapping #FFFFFF back in flattens the whole thing.
Other palettes.
Same format, different mood. Every hex on every one of them copies in a click.
- Fall color palettes Rust, ochre and oxblood, each row anchored by one genuinely dark brown.
- 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.
All thirteen palette collections · Pull a palette out of an image · Check a pair for contrast
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