Is this the same set as the tetradic generator?

Yes. Both pages run the same 90-degree derivation from one shared routine, so the same base gives the same four values on either page. The names differ; the engine does not.

Does it change lightness or saturation?

No. Hue is the only coordinate that moves, so all four swatches sit at the base's weight. If you need depth rather than hue variety, the shade and tint tools are the right next step.

Why can two of the four colours look almost identical?

Because equal hue spacing says nothing about perceived difference: two yellows ninety degrees apart can read as one colour to most viewers. Assign them to large separate areas or pick a different geometry.

Can I rotate the square without changing the base?

Not directly — the base anchors the square. To place the square elsewhere, set a different base colour and keep your original as the accent.

Square Harmony Palette

Q: Which four hues does it return?

The base colour and the hues ninety, one hundred and eighty and two hundred and seventy degrees around the wheel, in that order. All four share the base's lightness and chroma.

Color

#3B82F6

#d54b97

#c17400

#00a875

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Rectangle Harmony Palette

Two complementary pairs in a rectangle

Tetradic Palette Generator

Four colors in a rectangular harmony

Triadic Palette Generator

Three evenly spaced hues

Palette Sorter

Sort a palette by hue, lightness or chroma

The square harmony palette takes one base colour and returns four hues spaced ninety degrees apart — a square inscribed on the colour wheel, anchored wherever your base sits.

What is Square Harmony Palette?

Four hues at even spacing is the most symmetric thing a colour wheel can do, and the square harmony palette produces exactly that from one input. Set a base colour and four swatches appear: the base itself, then the hues ninety, one hundred and eighty and two hundred and seventy degrees around the wheel. Because the spacing is equal, the resulting square color scheme has no dominant member by construction — every hue has the same number of neighbours at the same distance, which is why four-way charts and four-category dashboards reach for it.

The four slots are the base, +90°, +180° and +270°, in that order.
Rotation happens in OKLCH and only hue moves: lightness and chroma are carried over from your base, so the four swatches share one weight.
Hue wraps through the full circle, so a base near 300 degrees produces derived hues that continue past 360 rather than clipping.
The derivation is deterministic: the same base always returns the same four values, on any machine and in any session.

The engine behind it is the shared harmony routine this domain uses everywhere: the base is converted to OKLCH once, each derived hue is written back as an oklch string and converted to hex for the strip, and every value is clamped to the valid range. The page presents the tetradic derivation, which is the 90 degree color harmony by another name — the same four evenly spaced hues the tetradic page produces, since all four-square work in this domain runs through one function.

The set is also easy to reason about when something looks wrong later. Because the angles are equal, a complaint that two colours sit too close is always a complaint about the base's lightness and chroma rather than about the geometry, and the remedy is a tonal step rather than a different rule. Recording the base beside the four values keeps that diagnosis possible months afterwards, when nobody remembers which hue the square started from.

There is no control beyond the base colour: no spacing, no rotation offset, no count.
The order is fixed at base, +90, +180, +270. Nothing sorts or reorders the strip.
Equal lightness across four hues does not mean equal legibility. Two of the four can look far closer than the angles suggest, and none of them is checked for text use.
No alpha, no neutrals and no lightness ladder: this is a hue set, not a full design system.

Use it when a layout genuinely has four channels that deserve equal weight: a four-series chart, a quad of feature cards, a board with four columns. Where one of the four needs to dominate, the square is the wrong geometry — the triadic set leaves room for an accent and the complementary pair is louder still. Before any of the four carries text, put the pairing through the contrast checker, since even spacing says nothing about readability, and use the palette sorter if the strip has to be ordered by hue or lightness for a legend.

How to use Square Harmony Palette

Set the base colour with the picker field, or type a hex value and let the field normalise it.
Read the four swatches: the base, then the hues at +90, +180 and +270 degrees.
Copy the hex value from any swatch you want to keep.
Check any text pairing from the set with the contrast checker before it ships.

When to use Square Harmony Palette vs related tools

Use this when four categories deserve equal visual weight. The rectangle harmony palette describes the other four-hue geometry, the triadic generator spreads three hues for the same purpose with room left for an accent, and the palette sorter orders the result for a legend or a swatch sheet.

Privacy & Security

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