Why uniformly random colours are useless
Picking three random numbers between 0 and 255 gives you a colour that is, almost always, a muddy mid-tone. Most of RGB space is greyish sludge; the vivid and pastel colours people want occupy a small corner of it. That is why so many random colour tools produce a run of things nobody would choose.
This one samples hue uniformly and constrains saturation and lightness to a usable band, then exposes that choice as a control rather than hiding it. "Anything at all" is still there if you want genuinely uniform randomness — it is instructive to run it a few times.
- Finding a starting point for a palette
- Assigning distinguishable colours to categories in a chart
- Breaking out of the habit of reaching for the same blue every time
- Placeholder colours that do not all look the same
The four ranges
Vivid keeps saturation high and lightness in the middle, which is where most brand and interface colours live. Pastel raises lightness and drops saturation for something soft. Dark does the opposite, for backgrounds and dark-mode surfaces.
Recent colours are kept below so you can go back to one you liked but scrolled past — the most annoying failure of a generator that only shows you the current result.
Getting the colour out
Hex, RGB and HSL each have a copy button. The current colour also lives in the address bar, so a result worth keeping is a link rather than a screenshot.
Space or Enter generates another one, which is faster than moving the mouse back to the button when you are cycling through looking for something.