If it is not AI, how does it produce coherent palettes?
By constraining where the colors can come from. Each mood defines a base hue, how far the five hues may fan out, and the saturation and lightness ranges they must fall within. The randomiser then picks inside that envelope. The 'sunset' recipe, for instance, fans 70 degrees around hue 18 at 70 to 95% saturation and 45 to 78% lightness. Cohesion is a property of the recipe, not of a model.
How do I build a palette around my brand color?
Switch to Seed color, enter your brand hex, and generate. The tool keeps that hue and builds a hue and lightness envelope around it. Then lock the swatch closest to your brand color and press Regenerate to re-roll the other four inside the same envelope until the supporting colors work.
Is the palette accessible?
It is not checked, and you should not assume it is. The generator optimises for coherence, not for contrast. The only accessibility affordance in the tool is the hex label on each swatch, which is switched between dark and light text based on the swatch's perceived brightness. Before shipping, check every text-on-background pair against WCAG: 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text and UI components.
What is the difference between Regenerate and New palette?
Regenerate re-rolls only the unlocked swatches, keeping the ones you have locked exactly where they are. New palette clears every lock and rolls all five fresh. The lock-and-regenerate loop is how you converge on a palette in a handful of presses instead of hunting for one.
How do I know which mood keyword will match my word?
Ten moods are defined (sunset, forest, ocean, pastel, neon, earth, berry, candy, monochrome, vintage) and each carries a list of synonyms, so 'autumn' finds sunset, 'cyber' finds neon, and 'terracotta' finds earth. Anything the matcher does not recognise falls back to ocean, so if you keep getting blues, your keyword is not matching.
Why do the five colors always get lighter from left to right?
By design. The lightness for each slot climbs steadily from the recipe's low end to its high end, with a small jitter. That gives you a usable scale, dark enough for text at one end and light enough for a background at the other, rather than five colors at the same value, which look busy and cannot be used together.