Beginner's Guide to Coolors: Find and Create Stunning Color Palettes
Why Coolors is Essential for Modern Design Workflows
Coolors is a web-based color palette generator that helps designers, artists, and creatives find, create, and organize stunning color combinations. Whether you're building a brand identity, designing a website, or creating marketing materials, Coolors simplifies the often complex process of color selection.
Quick Coolors Overview:
- What it is: Free color palette generator with premium features
- Who made it: Created by Fabrizio Bianchi from Italy
- Daily users: Over 2 million creatives worldwide
- Platforms: Web app, iOS/Android apps, browser extensions, design plugins
- Pricing: Free (limited) or Pro ($4.99/month, $35.99/year)
- Key feature: Hit spacebar to generate random color palettes instantly
Color selection can make or break any design project. Poor color choices confuse audiences, while great palettes create emotional connections and drive action. Coolors removes the guesswork by providing instant inspiration through its signature spacebar-powered generator and extensive palette library.
The platform serves everyone from Fortune 500 brand managers to indie game developers. Its simple interface hides powerful features like accessibility checking, photo-based color extraction, and seamless export to design tools like Figma, Procreate, and Power BI.
We're American Mortuary Coolers, a Tennessee-based supplier of custom mortuary equipment serving the funeral industry nationwide. We regularly use coolors to maintain brand consistency across our product line, ensuring every custom mortuary cooler reflects our clients' visual identity perfectly.
What Is Coolors & Who's Behind It
Picture this: you're staring at a blank canvas, struggling to find the perfect color combination that brings your vision to life. Coolors was created to solve exactly this problem. It's a web-based color palette generator that turns the often overwhelming world of color theory into something as simple as hitting your spacebar.
Coolors operates on a straightforward concept - it generates random color palettes instantly, but the magic lies in how it does it. Each palette follows color theory principles, ensuring the combinations actually work together harmoniously. With over 2 million daily users, the platform has become the go-to tool for designers, artists, marketers, and anyone who needs to work with colors professionally.
The platform follows a freemium SaaS model that's refreshingly honest. You can use the core features for free, and when you need more advanced tools, the Pro version costs just $4.99 monthly.
Creator & Company History
Fabrizio Bianchi, an Italian developer with an eye for design, started Coolors as a solo project that grew far beyond his initial expectations. Like many great tools, it began with Bianchi solving his own problem - he needed a faster way to generate color palettes for his design work.
What started as a simple web tool in Italy has evolved into a global platform serving millions. Bianchi's journey from solo developer to running Coolors srl shows what happens when you build something people genuinely need.
Why Coolors Matters for Creatives
Speed changes everything in creative work. Instead of spending hours tweaking colors and second-guessing choices, Coolors delivers perfect palettes in seconds. Hit the spacebar, and you've got a professionally harmonized color scheme ready to use.
Brand consistency becomes effortless with coolrs cross-platform sync. Create a palette on your laptop during a client meeting, refine it on your phone during lunch, then export it directly to Figma when you're back at your desk.
Coolors Features & Platforms Overview
Coolrs works everywhere you do. That's the real magic behind this platform - you can start a color palette on your laptop during a morning coffee break, tweak it on your phone during lunch, and have it ready in Figma by afternoon.
The web app serves as home base, packed with every feature you could want. Hit the spacebar for instant palette generation, browse thousands of community creations in the explore gallery, and organize your work into neat projects and collections.
Coolors Web and Mobile Apps
The web version gives you the full experience with all the bells and whistles. Keyboard shortcuts make everything lightning-fast - spacebar generates new palettes, clicking locks your favorite colors, and simple dragging fine-tunes everything perfectly.
Mobile users get something special with the Coolors iOS app. With a stellar 4.8 out of 5 rating from over 8,400 reviews, it's clearly hitting the mark. The app shines with its photo color extraction feature - snap a picture of anything and pull beautiful colors right from it.
Android users aren't left out either. They get the same great features, including that popular photo picker tool that works with both camera shots and saved images.
Coolors Browser Extensions & Plugins
Browser extensions bring coolrs right into your daily workflow. The Chrome extension lets you generate palettes without ever leaving your current tab. For specialized work, tools like the Coolors to Power BI Theme extension handle the technical heavy lifting automatically.
The Figma plugin makes design handoffs smooth as butter. Create your palette in coolrs, import it directly into Figma, and know your colors will look exactly right.
How the Coolors Palette Generator Works
The heart of coolrs lies in its deceptively simple generator that transforms a single spacebar tap into professional color palettes. Behind this neat interface runs sophisticated algorithms that understand color relationships better than most humans ever will.
When you hit that spacebar, you're not getting random chaos. The system carefully balances mathematical color theory with creative spontaneity, ensuring each generated palette feels both surprising and harmonious.
The magic happens through algorithmic randomization that respects the rules of color harmony. The generator considers how colors interact - their temperature relationships, saturation balance, and brightness contrast.
The "Space-Bar" Magic in Coolors
The spacebar interaction captures everything great about modern design tools - powerful simplicity that doesn't talk down to users. One key press generates five colors, but you stay in complete control through intelligent features that respond to your creative needs.
The randomization engine works like a creative partner who never runs out of ideas. Each spacebar press pulls from millions of possible combinations, but the algorithm ensures you're seeing quality suggestions rather than digital noise.
User locking transforms the generator from inspiration tool to problem solver. Lock your company's signature red and generate palettes that complement it perfectly. Lock two colors from a client's existing brand and find fresh directions that respect their established identity.
Coolors Advanced Editing Tools
Beyond the spacebar magic, coolrs offers professional-grade tools that turn simple palettes into comprehensive color systems. The shades and tints generator creates monochromatic variations that give you light and dark versions of any color.
Contrast ratios matter more than most designers realize, especially for accessibility compliance. The built-in accessibility checker analyzes how your colors work together for text and backgrounds, providing WCAG ratings that help you create designs everyone can actually use.
The gradient maker brings palettes to life by creating smooth transitions between colors. Generate CSS-ready gradients for web projects or create inspiration for print designs that need sophisticated color transitions.
Pricing, Free vs Pro, Data & Privacy
Coolors maintains a generous free tier while offering meaningful Pro upgrades. The freemium model ensures accessibility while providing sustainable revenue for continued development. Free users receive substantial value, while Pro subscribers open up workflow improvements.
Free tier limitations include 10 saved palettes, 1 project, 1 collection, and 5 favorite colors. These limits encourage organization while preventing feature abuse. Most casual users never hit these limits, while professionals quickly see the value in upgrading.
Pro pricing at $4.99 monthly or $35.99 annually positions the tool as an affordable professional expense. The annual plan offers significant savings, while monthly billing provides flexibility for project-based work. Cancellation works anytime with 3-day renewal reminders preventing unwanted charges.
Coolors Free-Tier Limits Explained
The 10-palette limit encourages curation over collection. Rather than hoarding every generated combination, users focus on palettes with real potential. This constraint often improves creative decision-making by forcing evaluation and refinement.
Single project limitation works for individual designers but constrains agencies or freelancers managing multiple clients. The restriction encourages Pro upgrades from professional users while maintaining free access for students and hobbyists.
Five favorite colors provide a personal brand foundation. Users can save signature colors and build palettes around them, creating consistency across projects. This feature bridges individual colors and complete palettes.
One collection limit restricts organizational capabilities. Collections group related palettes by theme, client, or project type. Professional workflows typically require multiple collections, making this a natural upgrade trigger.
Coolors Pro Perks & ROI
Unlimited palettes remove creative constraints entirely. Pro users can experiment freely, save everything, and refine later. This freedom often leads to finding unexpected combinations that would be lost under free tier limits.
Batch export capabilities streamline professional workflows. Instead of exporting palettes individually, Pro users can generate multiple formats simultaneously. This efficiency becomes crucial when delivering client assets or preparing comprehensive style guides.
Team sharing features enable collaboration on palette development. Design teams can share collections, comment on combinations, and maintain brand consistency across projects. This collaboration justifies Pro costs for agencies and in-house teams.
Font pairing suggestions complement color palettes with typography recommendations. This holistic approach to design systems saves research time and ensures visual harmony between color and type choices.
Privacy & Data Handling
Coolors collects minimal personal data, primarily contact information for account management. The platform doesn't sell user data or use it for unrelated purposes, maintaining trust through transparent privacy practices.
Data encryption protects stored palettes and personal information. User-generated content remains private by default, with sharing occurring only through explicit user action. This approach respects creative work while enabling community features.
GDPR compliance ensures European users receive appropriate data protection. Users control their information, can request deletion, and understand exactly what data is collected and why. This transparency builds confidence in the platform's data stewardship.
Integrations, Export Options & Real-World Use Cases
The beauty of coolrs lies in how seamlessly it plugs into your existing creative workflow. Instead of forcing you to change how you work, Coolors adapts to meet you wherever you are — whether you're coding in CSS, painting in Procreate, or building dashboards in Power BI.
Export options cover virtually every scenario you'll encounter. Need a PNG for a client presentation? Done. Want SVG files that scale perfectly for logo work? Got it. Building a website and need CSS variables with proper naming conventions? Coolors generates clean, developer-ready code.
The Procreate integration deserves special mention — it's become a game-changer for digital artists working on iPads. Generate your perfect palette in coolrs, export as Procreate swatches, and start painting immediately with pixel-perfect color accuracy.
Coolors in Design Workflows
Brand development projects often start with color exploration, and coolrs excels at this creative phase. Designers can rapidly generate dozens of potential directions, organize promising combinations into collections, and present refined options to clients.
UI design teams particularly appreciate the accessibility checking features. Building comprehensive design systems requires careful attention to contrast ratios and readability standards. Coolors takes the guesswork out of WCAG compliance by automatically flagging problematic color combinations.
Social media managers face the constant challenge of keeping content fresh while maintaining brand consistency. Coolors solves this by providing endless palette variations that stay true to brand guidelines.
Success Stories & Notable Projects
Startup founders often find coolrs during their initial branding phase. The platform's speed enables rapid exploration of brand directions without the expense of hiring designers upfront. One tech startup used Coolors to explore over 200 palette combinations before landing on their signature blue-and-orange scheme.
Comic book illustrators have adopted Coolors for maintaining visual consistency across long story arcs. The collections feature helps organize palettes by character moods, locations, or time periods.
At American Mortuary Coolers, we use coolrs to ensure every custom mortuary cooler reflects our clients' unique visual identity. When funeral homes request specific color matching for their facilities, Coolors helps us nail the exact shades that maintain their professional appearance.
Coolors vs Other Palette Tools & What Users Say
When it comes to color palette generators, coolrs faces competition from established players like Adobe Color and newer AI-powered tools like Colormind. But here's what sets Coolors apart: pure speed and simplicity.
Adobe Color offers extensive color theory education and advanced harmony rules - perfect if you want to dive deep into color science. But when you need inspiration right now, Coolors wins every time.
The numbers speak for themselves. Coolors maintains a stellar 4.8 out of 5 rating on iOS from over 8,400 reviews. That's the kind of consistent satisfaction that comes from a tool that just works the way your brain expects it to.
Coolors Community Feedback
The Coolors community is genuinely enthusiastic about their tool. Reddit threads light up with designers sharing their latest palette finds, while Twitter sees regular shout-outs from creatives who've found their perfect color combination through the platform.
Long-time users consistently praise how Coolors has evolved while keeping its core simplicity intact. "Absolute best generator experience" appears frequently in reviews, with users appreciating that updates add functionality without cluttering the interface.
But it's not all perfect. The most common complaint involves hidden UI controls that can frustrate newcomers. Some interface elements require hunting around, which interrupts the creative flow until you learn where everything lives.
Another frequent gripe is the lack of local storage. Unlike some design tools that cache your work locally, Coolors requires internet connectivity for full functionality.
Limitations & Work-arounds
Offline needs present the biggest challenge for Coolors users. While the mobile apps offer some offline capabilities, the full web experience needs connectivity. If you're heading somewhere with questionable internet, download your essential palettes beforehand for offline reference.
Export quirks occasionally require workarounds. Coolors covers most common formats beautifully, but specialized applications might need custom export options. Third-party conversion tools can bridge these gaps when you encounter an unsupported format.
Despite these limitations, most users find simple workarounds that keep their creative process flowing smoothly. The core coolrs experience remains so strong that minor inconveniences rarely drive people away from the platform.
Frequently Asked Questions about Coolors
How do I generate a palette from an image in Coolors?
Creating palettes from photos is one of coolrs most beloved features. Simply upload any image using the photo picker tool - you'll find it in both the web app and mobile versions. The platform works its magic by analyzing your image and pulling out the dominant colors that tell your photo's color story.
Once coolors extracts the colors, you're not stuck with what it gives you. You can lock the colors you love and hit that trusty spacebar to generate fresh combinations around them. Or dive into the fine-tuning controls to adjust individual colors until they match your exact vision.
The photo extraction works with any image format and actually gives you multiple palette options from each photo. This flexibility makes it perfect for branding projects where you need colors that play nicely with existing imagery. We've used this feature countless times at American Mortuary Coolers to create color schemes that complement our clients' memorial photography.
Can I cancel Coolors Pro anytime without losing palettes?
Absolutely - coolors keeps things stress-free when it comes to subscriptions. You can cancel your Pro subscription anytime through your account settings, and here's the good news: your saved palettes stick around even after you cancel.
You'll lose the Pro perks like unlimited saves and fancy export options, but your existing work stays safe. The platform even sends you a friendly reminder 3 days before your renewal, so you won't get any surprise charges.
This flexible approach shows coolors confidence in their platform's value. You can upgrade for big projects, downgrade when things slow down, and treat your Pro subscription like a tool rather than a life commitment. It's refreshingly honest in a world of subscription traps.
Does Coolors support color-blind safe options?
Coolors tackles accessibility through its built-in contrast checker rather than specific color-blind features. The tool analyzes how your colors work together and gives you WCAG compliance ratings - basically telling you if your palette will work for people with various visual abilities.
The contrast checker becomes your best friend when designing anything people need to read. It shows you exactly which color combinations pass accessibility standards and which ones might cause problems.
The coolors community also steps up here. Many designers share palettes specifically created with accessibility in mind, and you can filter the explore gallery to find these thoughtful combinations. For heavy-duty accessibility work, we recommend pairing coolors with specialized color-blind testing tools to cover all your bases.
The platform may not have every accessibility feature built-in, but it gives you solid foundations for inclusive design. Plus, the community aspect means you're learning from designers who prioritize accessibility in their own work.
Conclusion
At American Mortuary Coolers, we've found that coolrs plays a surprisingly important role in our Tennessee-based operation. When we're designing custom mortuary coolers for funeral homes across the contiguous 48 states, color consistency matters more than you might think. Every custom unit we manufacture needs to reflect our clients' brand identity perfectly - and Coolors helps us nail those exact color matches every single time.
The platform has genuinely transformed how we approach color in our industry. What used to require multiple back-and-forth conversations with funeral directors about "that specific blue" or "the exact shade of gray" now gets resolved quickly with precise color codes and visual references.
Coolrs succeeds because it makes complex color theory feel simple and approachable. Whether you're managing a Fortune 500 rebrand or just trying to pick colors for your small business website, the platform meets you where you are. The spacebar generator removes creative blocks, while the professional export options ensure your ideas translate perfectly into real-world applications.
The freemium model strikes the right balance too. Students and hobbyists get genuine value from the free tier, while professionals can upgrade when they need unlimited palettes and advanced features.
What impresses us most is how Coolors democratizes creativity without dumbing it down. Behind that simple spacebar interaction lies sophisticated color theory and accessibility checking. The platform respects both beginners who need guidance and experts who want granular control.
Curious about how thoughtful design extends beyond color into functional solutions? Our Comprehensive Guide to Walk-In Coolers explores how attention to detail creates better cooling solutions for specialized industries like ours.