Winter color palettes
Six cool-weather schemes, five colors each, ordered dark to light. Every hex copies in one click.
Winter schemes split into two families that behave nothing alike. The blue-gray family (slate, ice, frost) is quiet, recedes, and is the safest ground for an interface. The jewel family (pine, plum, deep teal) is the opposite: saturated, forward, and it needs a lot of neutral around it or it turns into a Christmas page by accident, which is a different SERP and usually not what you wanted.
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Slate and frost
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First snow
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Pine and smoke
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Nightfall
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Plum and ice
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Glacier
The trap in cool palettes is that they are much darker than they look. A frost blue that reads as pale on a white artboard is often only 2:1 against it, so body text in it fails outright. Use the two lightest colors as grounds and the two darkest as ink, and treat the middle one as decoration only. These are also the palettes most likely to be asked to work in dark mode: the blue-grays invert well, the jewel tones mostly do not, because a saturated pine on near-black loses almost all its separation.
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.
- 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
Start with the design
you already have.
Install the Figma plugin, send a frame across, and finish it on the canvas.