Summer color palettes

Six warm-weather schemes, five colors each, ordered dark to light. Click any hex to copy it.

Summer palettes are the most saturated of the four seasons, which is exactly why they need the most restraint. A page in which the coral, the turquoise and the sun yellow are all at full strength has no hierarchy - everything shouts, so nothing does. Each of the schemes below carries one deep blue or teal that is doing structural work: it is the ink, the header, the thing that makes the bright colors legible as accents rather than as noise.

  • Deep sea

  • Coral reef

  • Citrus

  • Poolside

  • Sunset strip

  • Watermelon

Watch the yellows. A summer yellow is almost never usable as a text color and rarely usable behind text - #FFD166 against white is about 1.4:1, which is invisible. It is a fill, an underline, an illustration color. The blues in these rows are where the contrast lives, and the deepest of them will usually clear AAA on the palest, which makes for a complete two-color system before you have touched gray at all.

Other palettes.

Same format, different mood. Every hex on every one of them copies in a click.

All thirteen palette collections · Pull a palette out of an image · Check a pair for contrast

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