Practical colour guides
Move from inspiration to a working design with practical colour guides.
Art-Inspired Colour Palettes for Modern Design
Use five art-informed colour systems as starting points for contemporary interfaces, identities and editorial work. Each is an editorial interpretation, not an official palette of a movement.
British Seaside Colour Palettes Beyond Blue and White
British seaside colour is as much about harbour paint, ticket ink and coastal light as it is about the sea. These six palette directions turn arcade glow, faded signage and shingle into practical systems for brands, editorial work and the web.
Cinema Colour Palettes: From Film Noir to Sci-Fi
Cinema-inspired palettes can turn lighting, contrast and atmosphere into a clear visual direction for posters and digital work. Explore seven catalogue palettes for noir shadows, sci-fi glow, Western dust and more.
How to Use a Five-Colour Palette Without Using Every Colour Equally
A five-colour palette works best when each colour has a job, rather than an equal share of the page. Use this worked Midnight SaaS example to assign roles, set flexible proportions and check the colour pairs that matter.
Retro Colour Palettes Through the Decades: 1960s to 2010s
Travel from psychedelic 1960s colour to restrained 2010s digital tones with practical, catalogue-backed palette choices. Learn how to borrow a decade's visual direction without turning every layout into a costume.
Colour Palettes: British places that inspire great colour palettes
Use the materials, weather and built details of British places to create a palette with clear roles, reliable contrast and a practical route into CSS.
Website colour accessibility: contrast ratios explained
A practical guide to choosing, calculating and testing website colour contrast so text, controls and visual cues remain readable and usable.
Colour Palettes: How to turn a colour palette into CSS variables
Turn a set of hex values into maintainable CSS colour tokens with semantic roles, theme overrides and contrast checks.
How to Choose a Colour Palette for a Website
Choose a website colour palette by assigning clear interface roles, checking real contrast pairs and turning the result into maintainable design tokens.
Colour palettes for food and drink brands
A practical way to turn food and drink references into a usable, accessible colour system for packaging, menus and digital touchpoints.
Brand colours: how colour shapes recognition
Build a recognisable brand palette by assigning clear roles, repeating them consistently and keeping every real-world application readable.