Random Color Generator 🎨 - Pick a Color at Random (2024)

Quick navigation:

1. Using the random color generator
2. What are HEX, RGB, and HSL colors?
3. How many colors does the random color picker choose from?
4. How the color generator works

Using the random color generator

To randomly generate a color (or 'colour' in British English) simply load this page. Press the "Pick a Random Color" button if you want the random color generator to produce another color for you. Our software uses a strong random number generator to produce the values of red, green, and blue that comprise each color. The output is the color, visualized, and its unique code in HEX, RGB and HSL.

If you want to pick more than one colour simply enter the number required in the first field. For example, to pick two random colors, enter "2". To pick three random colors, enter "3".

If using the random color wheel to generate distinct unique colors i.e. for players in a game, first input the number of players in the first field, then select an appropriate color palette. The color generator supports randomly choosing between red and blue, red and black, and black and white. Additionally you can use the 3-color wheel consisting of the three primary colors (red, yellow, blue), the 6-color wheel which has the three secondary colors (orange, green, violet) on top of these, or the 12-color wheel which contains the six tertiary ones in addition to the primary and secondary ones. Ideally, use a palette with as many colors as the number of unique ones that you need, or slightly more. The maximum supported number of unique colors is twelve, regardless from which palette they are being picked.

What are HEX, RGB, and HSL colors?

These are various systems for presenting colors in a technical and uniquely identifiable way. Three of these are supported in our random color picker:

• HEX is just a group of six hexadecimal digits and is a representation often used in web design. For example, the HEX code for the color black is #000000 while the HEX code for a color in the purple range is #8f0f8d.
• RGB stands for "Red, Green, Blue" and mostly applies to digital displays, computer monitors, television screens and so on. A color written in RGB consists of three numbers, each signifying the amount of red, green and blue light that needs to be mixed in to produce the desired end color.
• HSL stands for "Hue, Saturation, Lightness" which is an alternative way of encoding colors. Roughly speaking, hue refers to the part of the light spectrum (0-360°), saturation to its intensity (0-1, 0-100%), and lightness to its brightness (0-1, 0-100%).

Our random color generator will output the randomly chosen color in all three systems, for your convenience.

How many colors does the random color picker choose from?

As colour is simply visible light at a certain frequency, there are, for practical purposes, an infinite number of colors since the frequency range can be divided almost infinitely. The human eye is pretty good at what it does and can distinguish between about 10 million colors ^[1]. In theory, we could draw a random color from that infinity.

However, most modern screens and monitors can reproduce over 16 million colors and so this is also the range of colors our color generator picks between. It's virtual "color wheel" consists of 16,777,216 colors, to be precise.

How the color generator works

The basis of the functionality is a random number generator which produces random numbers in a specified range which depends on the selected color palette. If the entire colour wheel is specified then it produces numbers from the entire range of each of the hex triplets which are six-digit hexadecimal numbers used in computing applications to represent colors (e.g. HTML colors, CSS colors, SVG, and various other image formats). Since the numbers are picked at random the end result is that it functions as a color randomizer, so basically it is picking colors at random.

The randomness of the RNG means that there is equal probability of picking any of the possible colors. As result, the color generator is unbiased in its selection of a random color from the palette.