Red Color Swatches

Red is the family that arrives first. It is the color of a stop sign, a ripe tomato, a hand-written correction, and it carries the whole range from a soft rose water to the near-black of dried oxblood. In this library red runs through brick and terracotta earths, through the deep clarets used in wine labels, and out to the clean scarlet of a warning stripe. Because red advances toward the viewer while most colors recede, it takes very little of it to hold a composition.

One red accent in a field of gray reads as a decision; four reds of similar weight read as an argument. The swatches below are ordered from the lightest tint to the darkest shade so the same family can be seen as a scale rather than a set of unrelated chips. Every one carries a name, a hex value and its RGB reading.

Read the list from the top down and the family separates into three zones: the blushes and dusty roses that work as warm neutrals, the brick and terracotta mid tones, and the clarets that behave almost like black. Most palettes that use red well take one color from the first zone as a background, one from the second as an accent, and skip the third unless the design is deliberately formal. If a particular red here looks close to what you want, its page will show the tints and shades between it and white.