Shade Ramp

Generate Similar Colour Shades

Pick one colour and get an evenly stepped ramp from dark to light. The set an interface actually needs from a brand colour.

Describe the edit — the AI assistant does it on the canvas.

2 free credits · No signup · ~10 seconds

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Results in seconds
2 free credits included

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Want to apply these colours to an image? Open Palette Studio.

Tints, shades, and why you need a ramp

01

Tints, shades, and tones

A tint is the colour mixed toward white, a shade is mixed toward black, and a tone is mixed toward grey. This ramp spans the full range rather than only lightening, because a set of tints alone reads as washed out.

02

What interfaces really need

A design system needs more values of one colour than it needs different colours: a background, a hover, a border, a pressed state, a disabled state, a focus ring. One brand hex gives you none of those on its own — a ramp gives you all of them.

03

Even numbers do not look even

The eye reads lightness non-linearly, so a mathematically even spread looks bunched at one end. Choose the step count by looking at the result rather than trusting the arithmetic, and adjust until the gaps read evenly.

04

How many steps

Five to seven covers most interface needs. Nine or more suits a full design system with many surface levels. Beyond about twelve, adjacent steps stop being distinguishable and the extra values are dead weight.

05

A ramp makes contrast tractable

With one hue varying only in lightness, contrast becomes a single-axis problem. Pick text and background from far enough apart on the ramp and the ratio generally passes without needing to reason about hue at all.

How to generate similar colour shades

1

Pick your base colour

Set the picker to your brand or starting colour. Nothing to upload.

2

Choose the step count

Drag the slider for how many shades you want, from three to twelve.

3

Copy what you need

Click a swatch to copy one hex, or copy the whole ramp.

Generate Similar Colour Shades — in the editor

The real editor, start to finish — no signup needed to try it yourself.

Generate Shades

2 free credits · No signup · ~10 seconds

Where a shade ramp is used

Design tokens

Generate the 100 to 900 scale a design system expects from one brand colour.

Brand documentation

Publish the tint and shade range a guideline needs.

Sequential charts

Build a single-hue scale that encodes magnitude.

Dark mode variants

Find the darker end of a brand colour that still reads on a dark surface.

Used by designers, indie devs & students at

What people use it for

The jobs the editor was built around — and what it does differently on each one.

Colourways you can revisit

Every edit is a layer, not a bake. When the brand shifts, reopen the file and change the colour rather than rebuilding the variant from the original.

Cutouts with awkward edges

AI background removal that keeps hair, foliage and soft shadows instead of stamping a hard outline around them. The output is a transparent PNG, ready to place.

No export, edit, re-import loop

The Framer plugin runs on the canvas you are already working in, so a recolour or a cutout does not mean a round trip through a second application.

Ten options in the time one used to take

Recolour once and step through the alternatives, so a client review can look at the whole range instead of the one version there was time to make.

Brand colours matched exactly

Pick a colour straight off an existing asset and get the hex, rather than eyeballing it against a screenshot and hoping it is close enough.

Free to preview, priced per export

Previewing is unlimited and costs nothing. A credit is spent only when you download a full-resolution file, so exploring an idea is never the expensive part.

Frequently Asked Questions

4.8/5 from 1,250+ users

Generate a shade ramp

Pick a colour, set the steps, and copy the hex codes.

Generate Shades