9 Useful Tools for Creating Material Design Color Palettes

One of the biggest things you’ll notice in material design is the use of bold, vibrant colors. Material design’s color guidelines describe the color style as being “inspired by bold hues juxtaposed with muted environments, deep shadows, and bright highlights.” If you need to generate material design color palettes, these online tools will help.

P.S. Try our free HTML Color Picker tool to find the best design colors for your website!

1. Material Palette

In this tool, you start by picking your primary color and accent color. Afterwards, it will show you a live preview of the generated color palette and offer you a variety of ways to download it.

2. Material UI’s Material Design Colors

This is a nifty “cheatsheet” that presents all of the material design colors in one page.

3. Random Material Generator

Do you want to let fate decide what your color palette should be? Use this tool to randomly choose your material design colors.

4. Material Design Palette Generator

If you’re interested in creating a custom, material-design-like color palette, check out this tool. First, you need to specify a color — and it doesn’t have to be one of the official material design colors — using a color picker dialog window similar to the ones you can find in your favorite graphics editor. The Material Design Palette Generator will then generate color swatches based on your chosen color.

5. Material Mixer

This useful tool shows all material design colors in a conveniently compact grid layout. Click on a primary color and accent color to preview and generate your color palette.

6. Material Colors

This tool displays just the 500 and A200 colors of material design color swatches.

7. MaterialUp’s Material Design Colors

This is another simple tool for visualizing material design colors. It shows the primary colors side-by-side. Clicking on a “color bar” shows all of the color swatches associated with that color.

8. Tint UI’s Material Design

This tool displays just the material design 500 colors.

9. designskilz’s Material Design Colors

This simple tool helps you visualize all the material design color swatches along with their official names (e.g. Pink, Light Blue, etc.).

Material Design Color Plugins for Graphics Editors

If web tools aren’t your thing, you can instead install a plugin/extension that integrates the material design color swatches right into your design software.

• For Photoshop / Illustrator: Google provides downloadable Adobe color files (.aco) to make it easier to develop your color palette within Photoshop and/or Illustrator.
• For Sketch: Check out the open source Material Design Color Palette Sketch Plugin by Koji Ishimoto.
• For Gimp / Inkscape: You’ve got a couple of options: gimp-material-design-color-palette by KiSSFLOW and material-design-colors by Soichiro Kashima.

Read Next

• Color: The Next Limited Resource?
• A Look into Color Theory in Web Design
• Introduction to CSS Colors

Jacob Gube is the founder of Six Revisions. He’s a front-end developer. Connect with him on Twitter.