50 Beautiful Color Combinations For Your Next Design Project

Photography has long been one of the more dependable teachers of color. A well-composed image has already settled the questions most designers wrestle with at the start of a project (which hue leads, which one recedes, how warm the shadows should run), and a palette sampled from it tends to bring that same sense of balance to whatever it’s applied to. Every color combination in this collection was built that way, each one drawn from a single photograph.

Five hex codes, one source image. Each of the 50 palettes sits beside the photograph it was sampled from, with five hex codes attached, a format first put together by the team at Visme and published here. That makes the set just as handy for brand identity work as for interface design or data visualization, where, frankly, default chart colors are still doing a fair bit of damage.

Proportion is what’s worth studying. Lining up five swatches in a neat row flattens what the photograph actually shows. In most cases one or two dominant tones carry the frame, and the brighter accents turn up only in small doses. The amber in a dusk sky works because there’s so little of it. Read each palette against its image rather than as an evenly weighted strip, and the 60-30-10 principle stops being something you memorized in design school and becomes something you can actually see.

Adapt before you deploy. Colors pulled from a backlit photo often run hotter than print can reproduce, and we’d be surprised if many of these pairings met WCAG contrast requirements for body text without a little adjustment. Treat them as an informed starting point, then tune value and saturation to suit the medium. The full set of 50 color palettes and their hex codes follows below.