A Happy Hues alternative

Happy Hues and GetColors at a glance

Where Happy Hues is strong

Happy Hues, made by Mackenzie Child, describes itself as "a color palette inspiration site that acts as a real world example as to how the colors could be used in your design projects." Pick a palette and every color on the site updates, and each section lists its own colors: background, headline, paragraph and button for the layout, and stroke, main, highlight, secondary and tertiary for the illustrations.

The site also teaches as it goes, with short notes on hue, tint, shade, tone, value and saturation, and a section on the psychology of color. Its goal, in its maker’s words, is to "remove the issue where you know you like a color palette, but you're unsure about how to apply it to your design or illustration." It does that charmingly, and for a quick look at a handful of curated combinations it is a lovely place to start.

What GetColors adds

• More palettes: 640+ curated palettes, tagged by color, mood, style and use, such as pastel, vintage or neutral.
• Real UI on every palette page: a landing page and a dashboard, with a switch for light and dark, and the pairs that pass for text.
• Your own colors in context: the palette visualizer puts any palette on a landing page, dashboard, mobile app or article, checks contrast and exports code.
• Editing: open any palette in the generator, lock the colors you like and change the rest.
• Learning: guides to color theory and color meaning, each with palettes you can open.

The palette visualizer reads its colors from the address too: /visualizer?colors=264653-2a9d8f-e9c46a-f4a261-e76f51 opens those five colors on the preview, and Copy link saves the whole view, including mode, template, fonts and any roles you changed.

• A palette generator with 2 to 10 colors: press the spacebar for a new palette and lock the colors you want to keep.
• 640+ curated palettes with names and tags, and 420+ CSS gradients.
• A color picker from image: click any pixel for its HEX, RGB and HSL codes and its color name, or pull a palette of 2 to 10 colors.
• A contrast checker with both WCAG 2 ratios and APCA, and a palette visualizer that previews colors on real UI.
• A Color System Studio that turns one brand color into light and dark roles with checked contrast, and a Tailwind scale generator for 50 to 950 shades in OKLCH.
• Reference pages for 920+ named colors, shades, color meanings and color theory.
• Exports to URL, PDF, CSS, CSS Display P3, SCSS, Tailwind v3 and v4, JSON, SVG, ASE, GIMP, Procreate, design tokens, Style Dictionary, Swift, Android and Flutter.
• A free REST API with no key and an MCP server for AI agents (see integrations).

Taking a Happy Hues palette further

1. On Happy Hues, click each swatch you want to copy its hex code.
2. Put the codes after ?colors= in the GetColors visualizer address, separated by dashes, to see them on four layouts and check the text pairs.
3. Or put them after /generate/ to edit the palette and export it as CSS, Tailwind, ASE or design tokens.

GetColors palette links are the hex codes separated by dashes after /generate/, for example /generate/264653-2a9d8f-e9c46a-f4a261-e76f51, so any list of hex codes you have becomes a palette by pasting it into that address.

Frequently asked questions