How to use Palette Studio
A palette is a decision a client has to see. This makes the sheet — with the codes, in your typeface, and honest about what a press will do to it.
A short guide to getting good results, plus answers to the questions people ask most.
How to use it
- 1
Pick a year
The tool opens on 1967. Drag the timeline, type a year, set a range or press Random; the bank lists every palette in use then, filtered by graphic, interior, fashion, illustration or product.
- 2
Make it yours
On the Palette tab, edit any swatch, name it, flag it as a spot ink, add a harmony from one color or extract a palette from a photograph. Variation keeps the era and moves the colors a little.
- 3
Lay out the sheet
Choose an arrangement and where the codes sit, set the title and subtitle, pick a typeface for each, and choose the sheet — 4K slide, Letter, A4, square or custom — on the Canvas tab.
- 4
Preview, then export
Switch between Digital, Coated, Uncoated and Spot on the rail, turn on Compare to see them side by side, then export the picture as PNG, SVG or PDF and the swatches as ASE.
About this tool
Color has a history and clients respond to it. Drag the timeline to 1967 and the bank lists the palettes in use that year — Expo 67's identity, the vibrating complementaries of the San Francisco poster scene, Carnaby Street, the Op art that had just turned chromatic — each one authored from the historical record with a line on where it came from. Pick a decade, a range or let the dice choose, then make it yours: a variation keeps the era and moves every color a little, a harmony builds five colors from one in Lab, and a photograph gives up its palette in a second.
Then the part that usually takes an afternoon in a layout program. Nine arrangements — bands, rows, a paint-chip deck, a tonal ladder, 60·30·10 proportions, a poster with a hero color, a seeded mosaic — with the codes stacked, inline or as a spec table, set in any of the Google Fonts families or a face you upload. Switch the preview to coated or uncoated CMYK and the bright blue and the orange go quiet the way they will on press, with the ΔE of each shift named; switch to spot and they come back. Export exactly what is on screen, as a 4K slide, a Letter or A4 sheet at 300 dpi, a square, or your own size.
Features
A timeline, not a list
Ninety palettes from Egyptian tomb painting to the 2020s, keyed to years so a slider finds them. The twentieth century gets half the rail; 1967 alone has twelve.
Every code a printer or developer asks for
HEX, RGB, CMYK, HSL and Lab on the sheet, in a spec table, in the clipboard, or as ASE, GPL, CSS and JSON. Flag any swatch as a spot ink and name it.
Print beside digital
Coated, uncoated and spot simulations built on the ISO 12647-2 gamut limits, with the ΔE of each color's shift listed — and a compare view that splits the sheet down the middle.
Your typeface, or 1,900 free ones
Search the whole Google Fonts catalog by name or category, or drop a TTF, OTF or WOFF of the client's own face. Uploaded fonts travel inside a saved sheet.
Frequently asked questions
Is the palette generator free?
Yes. Every era, every layout, every export and the whole font library are free, with no sign-up and no watermark. Nothing is uploaded — the sheet is made in your browser.
Where do the historical palettes come from?
They are authored for this tool from museum, archive and design-history sources — pigment analyses, period trade press, exhibition records — and each carries a note saying so. No commercial color library is reproduced: the values are this tool's own interpretation of what the record describes.
How accurate is the CMYK preview?
It is a gamut model, not a press profile. Each color is taken to Lab and its chroma squeezed toward the limits ISO 12647-2 publishes for that hue on that paper, with the paper white and the darkest black of the stock. It is right about the thing clients are surprised by — saturated blues, oranges and limes going dull — and it names the ΔE of each shift. For a contract proof, send the PDF to your printer.
What about spot colors?
Any swatch can be flagged as a spot ink and given the code your printer will mix from — the tool ships no proprietary swatch book. The Spot preview draws it solid, which is why a spot job can hold a color that process printing cannot, and the ASE export writes it as a spot swatch.
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