Vintage color palettes

Six aged schemes, five colors each, every hex copyable in one click.

Vintage and retro get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. Retro is a specific decade's palette reproduced at full strength. Vintage is any palette that has been aged - faded, yellowed, and robbed of its extremes. That distinction is the whole method: you do not pick vintage colors, you take ordinary ones and apply the two adjustments below.

  • Foxed paper

  • Faded postcard

  • Library

  • Botanical plate

  • Apothecary

  • Nautical chart

First, remove pure white and pure black. Nothing that has aged still has either, so the lightest color becomes a cream around #F2E9D8 and the darkest a brown-black or ink around #2B241C. That single substitution does more work than any hue choice. Second, drop the saturation of everything and shift it very slightly toward yellow, which is what paper and dye actually do over decades. A vintage red is a brick; a vintage blue is a slate. If a palette still looks merely brown after both adjustments, the problem is that the lightness range collapsed - open it back up rather than adding another hue.

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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