The Color Name Finder turns any colour into something you can name, copy and build a palette around. Pick a swatch from the colour wheel, paste a hex code, or type a CSS colour name, and it instantly tells you the closest named CSS colour, how perceptually close that match is, and the exact HEX, RGB and HSL codes. It then derives a full set of harmony shades — complementary, analogous, triadic and split-complementary — each with its own nearest name and one-click copy.
It is built for designers, front-end developers, and anyone who has ever stared at a hex code wondering “what colour is that, really?” Instead of guessing, you get a perceptually accurate label and a ready-made palette in a couple of seconds.
How it works
Every colour you enter is normalised to RGB, then converted into CIE Lab colour space. Lab is designed so that the straight-line distance between two colours (called ΔE) closely matches how different they look to the human eye — unlike raw RGB distance, which can rank a colour as “close” even when it looks obviously different. The tool measures the ΔE between your colour and all 148 standard CSS named colours, then sorts them so the nearest, most human-sensible name comes first.
For the palette, the colour is converted to HSL and its hue is rotated around the wheel: 180 degrees for the complementary, plus and minus 30 for analogous, plus and minus 120 for triadic, and 150 and 210 for split-complementary. Each generated shade is run back through the same nearest-name engine, so you always know what to call it. A contrast check picks black or white as the readable text colour for each swatch, so previews stay legible.
Example
Start with #6495ed. The finder reports it as an exact match for cornflowerblue with a ΔE of 0. Its codes are rgb(100, 149, 237) and hsl(219, 79%, 66%). The complementary shade rotates the hue to roughly 39 degrees, landing on a warm sandy tone whose nearest name is sandybrown — an instant high-contrast accent. Nudge the lightness slider down and the nearest name shifts toward royalblue, showing how a small change in lightness can change what a colour is actually called.
Because the matching is perceptual, a slightly-off brand colour like #6a98ee still resolves to cornflowerblue with a small ΔE, confirming you are within tolerance of the named colour rather than a different one entirely.