Curve-Based HSL Color Palette Generator

I’ve gotten tired of the default color theme in Excel. As a palette snob, I’ve been wanting a color palette generator based on curve-fitting on a color wheel. The idea is to draw a curve on a color wheel, and sample the points along that curve to generate a smooth palette with natural transitions between hue, lightness, and saturation.

Open the tool full screen ↗

Sampling Colors from an Image. Drag and drop an image to auto-populate the color wheel with color samples (little white dots). You can then auto-fit a curve to those samples, or adjust it manually.

Two Curves. To generate multiple complementary palettes, make two curves. This is trickier to find a secondary palette that looks right, but a good starting point is to rotate the first curve 30, 60, or 180 degrees around the color wheel to get a complementary language.

Gradients. I’m auto-generating a few common color gradients: 2-colors, 3-colors, and a 3-color with white as the default midpoint.

Curve Sampling Types. Linear vs. smooth-curved options, and linear vs. smooth sampling along the curve. The default is a 3-pt curve, but you can add as many as you want.

Export. The script auto-generates a name and exports a palette sample page, and a hex palette JSON file (drag and drop into any LLM to use the palette for any report, Excel, or otherwise). It auto-generates colors for headers, borders, gridlines, gradients, and pie charts.

Dark interface of a curve-based HSL color palette generator with a color wheel and export options.(open larger)
This is an HTML tool drafted with Claude
Color palette sampler showing teal to magenta gradients and pie chart colors for design use.(open larger)
An example of the palette sampler export