Brand Style Guide Generator

The brand style guide generator turns one colour into five named roles — primary, primary dark, accent, surface and text — each with its own hex value.

What is Brand Style Guide Generator?

• One colour field drives the page, and the result is a list of five rows: a swatch, a role name and a hex value.
• The roles are primary, primaryDark, accent, surface and text, and each is derived by a fixed rule rather than chosen, so the set arrives complete and internally consistent the moment the base colour changes.

The rules are worth knowing because they explain what the output can and cannot be. Primary is the colour you entered, unchanged. Primary dark lowers its lightness by 0.15 with a floor so a near-black base cannot go further, while keeping the chroma and hue — that is the pressed or hovered version of the same colour rather than a different one. Accent keeps the lightness and chroma and rotates the hue by exactly one hundred and eighty degrees, producing the complementary colour as the second voice. Surface and text are theirs by construction: a near-white and a near-black built from the base's own hue, at very low chroma, which is what keeps a tinted paper and a tinted ink from looking grey next to the brand colour.

That construction is the value of the page. Most brand palettes assembled by hand end up with an accent that does not relate to the primary and a neutral that is either pure white or pure black, which reads colder than the rest of the set. Deriving five roles from one input removes those two decisions, and the result holds together because every role is a transformation of the same colour rather than an independent pick.

Brand color roles are also the part of a style guide that gets used, which is why the page lists roles rather than a ramp. A ramp answers how light a shade should be; roles answer what each colour is for, and five named slots cover the majority of what an interface needs — a primary action, its pressed state, one supporting accent, a surface and a text colour.

What it does not do is check the result. Nothing on the page measures the contrast between text and surface, between the primary and white, or between the accent and anything it might touch, and nothing warns when a base colour is so pale that the derived text role is the only one with usable contrast. It also does not export: the five values are shown as rows with hex printed, and taking them into a project means reading them.

Working through the roles in order is the quickest way to judge a candidate brand colour. A primary that arrives with a usable dark variant beside it and a vivid accent is a colour with range; one whose dark version is barely distinguishable from the primary, or whose accent lands on a hue nobody would use, is telling you the base needs adjusting. Because all five roles are recomputed on every change, cycling through three or four candidates takes seconds, and the decision gets made against the derived set rather than against a single swatch.

• Limits: five fixed roles, no naming, no contrast checking, no export, no dark-mode counterpart and no way to add a role or override one of the derived values.
• As a brand color palette from one color it is a small color system generator: enter a brand colour, read five brand palette hex values with their job attached, and use the brand style guide generator's arithmetic rather than deciding the relationships by hand.

How to use Brand Style Guide Generator

1. Pick the brand colour — this becomes the primary role.
2. Read the five rows: primary, primary dark, accent, surface and text, each with its hex value.
3. Change the colour to see the whole set move together, then take the values into the project.

When to use Brand Style Guide Generator vs related tools

Use this when a project has a single brand colour and needs the roles around it decided consistently. Use the design token generator when the output has to be a token file, or the palette accessibility checker when the derived pairs need auditing. A wider set derived from the same single colour is what the single color to full palette builds, and the same five roles packaged for code are the color token generator's output.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.

Frequently asked questions about Brand Style Guide Generator