iPhone & iPad

harmony
palette

where color gets along.

A color wheel you can actually work on, 160 palettes worth stealing from, and the accessibility tools you were going to skip. Built for people who pick colors for a living, and for anyone who just likes them.

Get it on the App Store Free to use. Pro from $2.99/month or $29.99 once.

color wheel · palettes · contrast · extraction · eleven languages

Color is the subject here,
not the decoration.

Most design tools treat color as a setting: a small square you click, buried in an inspector, on the way to doing something else. Harmony Palette is the opposite kind of program. Color is the whole screen, the interface is loud on purpose, and the point is to spend time with it rather than get past it.

That is a design decision, not an accident. The thick outlines and flat blocks are there because a color needs a hard edge to be judged against. Put a swatch on a soft gradient and you cannot tell what you are looking at. Put it in a black box next to another black box and you can.

two wheels, because
they disagree

Ask a screen what the opposite of red is and it says cyan. Ask a painter and they say green. Both are right, and they are answering different questions: one is how light mixes, the other is the wheel taught in art schools and refined by Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus.

This matters more than it sounds. A triad that looks evenly weighted on the RGB wheel can come out lopsided in RYB, and a palette built for print behaves differently from one built for a screen. Harmony Palette gives you both models and lets you flip between them on the same color, so you can see the disagreement instead of picking a side by accident.

Complementary

Two colors facing each other. The strongest contrast available, and the easiest to overdo.

Analogous

Three neighbours. Quiet and cohesive, which is why so much brand work lives here.

Monochromatic

One hue, worked through its shades and tints. Hard to get wrong.

Triadic

Three evenly spaced. Vivid and balanced at the same time, which is a rare combination.

Split-complementary

A base plus the two neighbours of its opposite. Nearly the same punch, far less tension.

Square & rectangular

Four colors, evenly or in pairs. Enough range for a whole system.

Compound

Complementary and analogous relationships braided together. Complex, and worth the trouble.

Eight in total

Four in the free version. The other four, and the curated library, come with Pro.

the accessibility part
you were going to skip

Contrast checking usually lives in a separate browser tab, gets done at the end, and gets skipped when the deadline moves. It is in here, next to the colors, while you are still choosing them.

Harmony Palette reports the WCAG 2.1 contrast ratio for any foreground and background pair and grades it AA and AAA, separately for normal and large text, because the thresholds are different: 4.5:1 and 3:1. When a pair falls short it can adjust the last color you touched until it clears the bar, so the fix takes a tap instead of a spreadsheet.

It also shows you the palette as someone else sees it. Protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia and achromatopsia, applied to a single color or to a whole saved palette, so you find out that your success green and your error red are the same swatch to a large number of people before you ship it rather than after.

a library you didn't
have to build

160 palettes, hand-picked across ten categories: nature, classic art, architecture, fashion, food and drink, geography, decades, abstract, holidays and branding. Starry Night is in there, and Bauhaus, and 70s Earth Tones, and the azure and sand of a Mediterranean coast. Each one carries tags, so you can look for a mood or a season rather than scrolling.

There are also 279 named colors, from the ordinary ones through to Papaya Whip and Gainsboro, so a color you land on has a name you can say out loud in a meeting.

The Harmony Palette color wheel with a complementary scheme selected, showing red and cyan swatches and a brightness slider.
The wheel, in RGB or RYB
A grid of saved palettes in the Harmony Palette library, each showing its colors and a name.
Your own library, in folders
The Explore tab showing featured curated palettes and category tiles for nature and classic art.
160 curated palettes
The Tools tab listing the contrast checker, color blindness simulator, random palette generator and image extractor.
The tools, all four of them

it leaves as code,
not as a screenshot

A palette that stays in the app is a mood board. A palette you can paste is work.

Pro exports SwiftUI and UIKit color extensions, CSS custom properties and a Tailwind config, ready to paste into a project without retyping a single hex value. For the other side of the job there is multi-page PDF for client presentations and SVG for print, plus social images sized for a square post, a portrait post or a story.

Free gets you HEX, RGB, HSL and HSV to copy by hand, which for a lot of people is all they ever need. CMYK sits with Pro, alongside the print exports it belongs to.

FreePro
The full color wheel, both modelsEverything in Free
4 harmony typesAll 8 harmony types
15 saved palettes, 3 foldersUnlimited palettes and folders
Color extraction from photos160 curated palettes
HEX, RGB, HSL and HSV valuesCMYK, the contrast checker and vision simulation
Sharing with a watermarkPDF, SVG and code export, no watermark

Pro is $2.99 a month or $14.99 a year, both with a seven day trial, or $29.99 once for good, which includes everything added later.

eleven languages,
colors included

Most apps translate their buttons. This one translates the colors.

All 279 color names and all 160 curated palettes, with their descriptions and their search tags, exist in every language the app ships in. A German user gets Mitternachtsblau, not Midnight Blue sitting inside an otherwise German interface. So does the palette called Sternennacht, described as van Gogh's swirling night piece, and the tags you would search it by.

Search understands both at once, which matters more than it sounds: if you first met a palette as Ocean Sunrise, in a tutorial or a screenshot, it is still there under that name no matter which language you now run the app in. Translation adds a way to find something. It never takes one away.

EnglishDeutschEspañolEspañol (LatAm) FrançaisItaliano日本語한국어 NederlandsPortuguês (BR)简体中文

quietly, it respects you

No account

Nothing to sign up for. Open it and it works.

Works offline

Every part of it, including extracting colors from a photo.

Photos stay put

Color extraction runs on the device. Your pictures are never uploaded anywhere.

No tracking, no ads

No advertising, no analytics, no data collection of any kind.

iCloud sync

Palettes and folders follow you between your own devices, through your private database.

iPhone and iPad

iOS 17.2 or later. One purchase covers both.

questions

What is the difference between the RGB and RYB color wheels?

RGB is how a screen mixes light, so the complement of red is cyan. RYB is the wheel taught in art schools and refined by Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus, where the complement of red is green. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions. A palette that looks balanced on one can look lopsided on the other, so you get both and can switch between them on the same color.

Does Harmony Palette check color contrast for accessibility?

Yes. It reports the WCAG 2.1 contrast ratio for any foreground and background pair and grades it AA and AAA for normal and large text. If a pair falls short it can adjust the last color you touched until it reaches 4.5:1. It also shows how a palette reads under protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia and achromatopsia.

Can I export a palette as code?

Yes. Pro exports ready-to-paste snippets for SwiftUI, UIKit, CSS custom properties and Tailwind, plus multi-page PDF and SVG. The free tier gives you HEX, RGB, HSL and HSV values to copy by hand.

Is Harmony Palette free?

The free tier is a real tool rather than a demo: the full wheel, four harmony types, up to fifteen saved palettes and color extraction from photos. Pro adds the other four harmonies, unlimited palettes, the curated library, the accessibility suite and the export formats, at $2.99 a month or $14.99 a year with a seven day trial, or $29.99 once.

Does it work offline, and does it collect any data?

It works entirely offline and there is no account. Photo analysis happens on the device and your pictures are never uploaded. Nothing is tracked, there is no advertising, and no data is collected. If you are signed in to iCloud, palettes and folders sync between your own devices through your private database.

What languages does Harmony Palette support?

Eleven: English, German, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese. All 279 color names and all 160 curated palettes are translated too, and search matches both the translated name and the English one.

go pick some colors

Free to start, no account, and the wheel is the first thing you see.

Get it on the App Store