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.
- 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.
- 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
Start with the design
you already have.
Install the Figma plugin, send a frame across, and finish it on the canvas.