The Coolors-Style Palette Generator I Built After Five Failed Versions

Coolors is the palette generator most designers start with. Hit spacebar, lock what you like, shuffle the rest. Five colors in five seconds, and the whole thing feels like play. It built a category for a reason.

I have used Coolors on and off for years. Late in 2025 I started building a mesh gradient generator of my own, and somewhere around the fourth rebuild I figured out what I actually wanted: Coolors, but with one change. Every palette should render as a living gradient, not a row of flat swatches.

This is the post about how that ended up as version 5 of InstantGradient.

Open

What Coolors gets right

The spacebar loop is the thing. Generate, evaluate, lock, repeat. You are not tweaking sliders or dragging points. You are saying yes or no, hundreds of times, and your taste gets better without you noticing. Coolors built that loop first and it still executes it best.

Around that loop, they added a real community. Public profiles, millions of saved palettes, trending sorts, a Figma plugin, an Adobe extension, a mobile app. If your workflow is "I need five colors for a brand by the end of the day", it is still the fastest tool on the internet.

What kept bugging me

Every palette in Coolors is five rectangles. That is the tool's promise and its limit.

I kept opening Coolors, finding a palette I liked, copying the hex codes, pasting them into a separate mesh gradient tool, and watching the exact same palette turn into something completely different in motion. Some palettes that looked great as bars washed out as gradients. Others that felt boring as swatches came alive once they started blending.

That gap told me something: a palette and its gradient are the same object. A flat swatch strip hides half the information. The colors you pick depend on how they blend as much as on how they look side by side.

What InstantGradient v5 actually does

Same mechanic as Coolors. Spacebar, generate, lock, shuffle. Save to your library. But while you work, the palette is rendered live as a GPU mesh gradient.

Harbor Dusk

Five hex codes, shown as both swatches and the gradient they produce. Same colors, two very different surfaces. You can see where the palette actually earns its personality.

From there you get the things Coolors does not do:

Export as MP4 video for social posts, hero backgrounds, presentation loops. The shader animates live at up to 4K.
Export as a 4K image (PNG or WebP), or as CSS, Tailwind, or JSON color tokens.
Apply visual effects like fluted glass, grain, or distortion. Adds texture without flattening the colors.

The community side

A palette tool without a community is just a random color machine. This is the part I care about most and the part that is still growing.

Every palette has a public page with a share card, a save counter, and a timeline showing who saved it. Every user has a public profile at /u/your-handle with a pinned palette, bio, and social links. You can browse the palette directory sorted by recent, popular, or by tag (warm, cool, pastel, bold).

When someone saves a palette you made, they get credited. When a palette crosses a save milestone, the bot posts about it on @instantgradient and tags the creator. The compounding is slow, but it is real.

Velvet Glow

How it compares

Tool	Palette generation	Live gradient	Video export	API	Community	Price
InstantGradient	Spacebar	GPU shader	MP4	Yes	Yes	Free / $5/mo
Coolors	Spacebar	No	No	No	Huge	Free / €5/mo
Adobe Color	Color rules	No	No	No	Moderate	Free w/ Adobe
Khroma	AI-learned	No	No	No	No	Free

Coolors still wins on community size and ecosystem integrations. Adobe Color is perfect if you already live inside Adobe. Khroma is a curious experiment in taste-based AI generation.

InstantGradient is the one to use if you want your palette to be more than a swatch strip.

The API angle

Something none of the tools above offer: a REST API that lets you generate palettes, look up color data, and browse community palettes from your own code. If you are building a product that needs a palette picker, a color library, or any kind of color-aware feature, the API gives you everything this site has behind a single authenticated endpoint. No other Coolors-style tool ships this. Read the API docs.

Who should use what

If you need five brand colors fast: Coolors.
If you need a palette as a usable visual asset (image, video, code): InstantGradient.
If you live in Figma or Photoshop: Adobe Color, or a Figma mesh plugin.

They solve different problems. Try both.

A quick note on the rebuilds

Four failed versions is a lot. The first try was a screenshot background generator, which I ended up moving to Mokkit. Then, a general-purpose design toolkit, then a blog post image generator, then a multi-tool studio. None of them stuck because none of them answered a clear question.

The question version 5 answers is: what does my palette actually look like as a surface? Not as swatches. As the thing I am going to ship. A hero section, a social background, a video loop. That answer turned out to be the whole product.

Built by one person, and the Pro tier is how I keep the lights on.