A while back I decided to stop using Tailwind for new projects and to just write vanilla CSS instead.

But one thing I missed about Tailwind was the colour palette (here as CSS). If I wanted a light blue I could just use blue-100 and if I didn’t like it maybe try blue-200 or blue-50. I’m not very good with colours so it makes a big difference to me to have a reasonable colour palette that somebody who is better at colour than me has thought about.

But I’m also a little tired of those Tailwind colours, so I asked on Mastodon today what other colour palettes were out there. And then a friend said they wanted links to those colour palettes, so here’s a blog post so my friend can see them, and all the rest of you too :)

my favourites

The ones I liked the most were:

• uchū (css file, FAQ)
• flexoki (css file)
• reasonable colours, which seems to have a focus on accessibility (css file)

more colour palettes

• web awesome
• radix
• US web design systems
• material design

colourscheme generators

Folks also linked to a bunch of colour palette generators

• harmonizer
• tints.dev
• coolors
• colorpalette.pro

I’ve always found these types of generators too hard to use but maybe one day I will get better enough at colour that I’m able to use a colour palette generator successfully so I’ll leave those links there anyway.

and more colour tools:

• colorhexa has some info about colorblindness

oklch

Generative colors with CSS gives an example of how to use the oklch CSS function to dynamically generate colors.