Pull a five-colour palette and a typographic mood out of the words in your lyric.
Every release needs artwork, and artwork needs a decision made before anyone opens a design tool: what colour is this song? This tool reads the imagery in your lyric and votes on an answer — five swatches with hex codes, plus a type treatment that matches the temperature and weight it found. It is a starting point for a conversation with a designer, not a design.
Run it and the palette shows up here.
Why the words already tell you the colour
Most lyrics describe things, and things have colours. A song full of frost, glass, concrete and sodium light is cool and hard. A song full of rust, honey, dust and embers is warm and dry. You already made the decision when you wrote the imagery; you just have not read it back as a colour yet.
The vote is deliberately crude. Each matched word casts one vote for a hue family, one for a temperature and one for a weight, and the totals decide the palette. A lyric with four cold words and one warm word gives you a cold palette with a warm accent — which is usually the interesting answer, and exactly the one a designer wants to hear.
How to use the result
- Give a designer the dominant and the accent, not all five. Five colours is a palette; two is a decision.
- The deep swatch is for type on the cover. Check it against the dominant for contrast — most cover failures are contrast failures, not colour failures.
- The neutral is for backgrounds and margins. Using your dominant as the background is why so much independent artwork looks like a colour swatch test.
- If the palette disagrees with what you hear in your head, trust yourself. The word list is finite and your song is not.
Questions people ask
- Is this reading my song’s meaning?
No. It is a word-to-colour lookup table that a person wrote. It matches words, not intent, and it has no model of emotion behind it.
- Why is a word I used not counted?
The map holds around 180 entries. Anything outside it is simply not counted, which is why a very abstract lyric can come back with a thin result.
- Can I use these colours commercially?
Yes — hex codes are not copyrightable. But the artwork you make with them is your own work, and if you use a photograph you still need the rights to it.
- Why does the suggested type look like that?
It is derived from the temperature and weight votes: warm and heavy pushes to a heavy serif in caps, cool and light pushes to a light sans with wide tracking. It is a starting point, not a typeface recommendation.
What this tool does not do. This is a word-to-colour lookup written by a person, not an analysis of what your song means. Two people reading the same line will picture different colours, and yours is the one that matters. It cannot check contrast, it cannot see your reference images, and it is not a designer. Nothing is uploaded; everything runs in your browser and works offline. See the site disclaimer. Written by Nico, who builds these tools and writes about writing at WrittenTone.