The Purpose

I read an article that said generating random colors in JavaScript is easy, but generating pleasing random colors is more difficult. The article went on to present a long file of JavaScript that uses the HSV color model to choose colors with pleasing saturation and value in random hues.

I tried to implement a similar function using only RGB and simple heuristics to keep the colors in a pleasing color space. For example, it tries to keep each value of the hex triplet between #20 and #D0, so the colors won't end up too light or too dark. Darker colors are then shifted 1/3 of the way toward #00, and lighter colors are shifted 1/4 of the way toward #FF.

You can choose:

• How many random colors will be displayed.
• Whether the colors will be generally light, dark, in the middle, or of random shades and tints.
• Whether the colors will be taken from any one of eight primary and secondary colors, or randomly from all those colors.

Pleasing Random Colors

10 25 50 100 Darker Middle Lighter Random Red Orange Yellow Green Cyan Blue Violet Magenta Random