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.

  • Slate and frost

  • First snow

  • Pine and smoke

  • Nightfall

  • Plum and ice

  • 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.

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