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Should we use the Material Design Color Tool in 2025?
Since its inception, Material Design Color Tool has established itself as an obvious reference for anyone embracing the Google ecosystem, offering a simple path to consistent color palettes. But with trends and frameworks evolving rapidly in 2025, is it still a relevant tool for our visual creations? Simplicity, features, limitations... I have been using Material Design Color Tool on a daily basis for several years now. Here, I share my feedback and objective opinion on its real usefulness for professionals, depending on your specific needs.
My experience with the Material Design Color Tool
I've had the Material Design Color Tool open in my tabs for several years now. It has become an indispensable resource for me, particularly because of its ability to ensure the accessibility of our palettes.
This tool really shines when you need to build a color harmony that complies with WCAG standards, which is essential for our application and website projects that aim for inclusivity. It allows you to validate readability at a glance, which saves a huge amount of time.
On the other hand, if you're looking for total creative freedom, or if you're working on brand identities that are very different from Material Design guidelines, its recommendations can sometimes be a little rigid. It's excellent within its framework, but less versatile for pure experimentation.
Is the Material Design Color Tool really useful for my needs?
The real question to ask yourself before using Material Design Color Tool is: what is my goal? Because its relevance depends on how you use it. The tool excels at generating consistent color palettes that comply with Material Design guidelines. It's a great starting point for laying the visual foundation for a new app or website.
Whether you're a UI/UX designer, front-end developer, or project manager, this tool will save you a ton of time. Quickly define primary and secondary colors, generate all shades, and check contrast accessibility. Ideal for kicking off a project or validating an artistic direction at an agency.
Another major advantage is its focus on accessibility. The tool guides you in choosing sufficient contrasts, a step that is often overlooked. This simplifies compliance with WCAG standards, which are essential for inclusive and modern interfaces in 2025.
Is Material Design Color Tool suitable for beginners?
You're diving into creating color palettes, and it can quickly become a headache when you're just starting out. The Material Design Color Tool is like your personal mentor. It guides you step by step, with clear design rules built in. It's impossible to get lost: you explore tried-and-tested palettes and instantly see how your color choices look on different UI elements, from text to buttons. It's ideal for understanding the basics without feeling overwhelmed.
This tool is a real springboard. It doesn't leave you to improvise: it validates the compliance of your combinations in real time, particularly in terms of accessibility—a crucial point that is often overlooked by novices. For a designer in training or someone migrating to digital, it ensures you start off on the right foot and create consistent, functional interfaces without spending hours trial and error.
How much does Material Design Color Tool cost?
Wondering how much this essential tool costs? Great question! We often talk about investing in our design tools, but with the Material Design Color Tool, the answer is simple: zero dollars. Yes, you read that right. Google is making this powerful resource available to us for free.
This is a major advantage, whether you're a freelance designer on a tight budget, a fast-growing startup, or even an established agency like ours. The lack of cost does not mean limited functionality—quite the contrary. You get access to all the palette creation, accessibility testing, and preview options without spending a dime. No à la carte packages, no hidden subscriptions. Total freedom to experiment and ensure perfect consistency across your Material Design interfaces. Frankly, it's one of those gifts you can't refuse in our line of work.
What are the key features of Material Design Color Tool?
When launching a new project, visual consistency is key. What I immediately appreciate about the Material Design Color Tool is its ability to generate color palettes that are perfectly in line with Google's guidelines. No more hours spent fumbling around trying to find the right shade; you select your primary and secondary colors, and the tool gives you the entire range with the exact values. For us at Easy Web, this saves us a huge amount of time in the early stages of design, ensuring perfect harmony across all our interfaces.
But the innovation doesn't stop there. Beyond simple generation, the tool includes a valuable feature: real-time previews on typical user interface (UI) elements and, above all, an accessibility check. How many times have we had to revisit color choices to ensure sufficient contrast? With this tool, you get immediate feedback on the contrast ratio for text on the background, ensuring compliance with WCAG standards. It's an essential safety net for delivering inclusive and compliant designs.
One of the major advantages of Material Design Color Tool is clearly its built-in accessibility checker. No more guesswork! The tool analyzes the contrast ratios between your text and background colors in real time, telling you whether they comply with WCAG standards. In 2025, compliance is non-negotiable. We can no longer afford to leave users behind because of poor contrast; it's simply unthinkable for an agency.
Beyond compliance, I particularly appreciate the visualization of the palette on a typical Material Design interface. It allows you to immediately project the final rendering of your color choices onto UI elements such as buttons, cards, or application bars. This saves a tremendous amount of time when validating an artistic direction and avoids costly back-and-forth with development. It's concrete and directly integrated into the design process.
Frankly, the Material Design Color Tool is great for Material projects, but it quickly shows its limitations. For a truly unique graphic charter, or very specific accessibility needs beyond basic WCAG, you will quickly feel the constraints. Free exploration and advanced customization are its weak points, as I have experienced.
This is where we naturally turn to tools such as Coolors or Adobe Color, which offer more freedom. But don't throw away the Material Design Color Tool! For designers who want a clean and fast Material base, it remains a powerful ally. It excels in its niche, that's for sure.
So, the conclusion is clear:
Advantages:
- Simplicity and speed for Material Design.
- Seamless integration with the Google ecosystem.
- Integrated accessibility features.
Disadvantages:
- Lack of flexibility outside of Material.
- Limited features for advanced exploration.
- Not well suited to complex charts.
FAQ
Is it reliable and secure?
Absolutely. Since it is designed and maintained by Google, this tool benefits from their technical infrastructure and state-of-the-art security protocols. You don't have to entrust it with any sensitive data; it simply generates and displays your color choices. It is a reliable and stable environment for all your color explorations, with no strings attached. It runs like clockwork, so you can use it with complete confidence.
Is it compatible with my other tools?
Clearly, its strength lies in integration. You generate your palettes, and color code exports—hex, RGB, HSL—are immediate. They can be used directly in Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD. For developers, copying and pasting into your SCSS or CSS variables is extremely fast. No more manual conversions. It's designed to fit seamlessly into your existing workflows, without any friction. A real time-saver for us at Easy Web on a daily basis.
Is there responsive customer support?
Listen, to be blunt: as a Google tool, the Material Design Color Tool does not offer responsive customer support in the traditional sense, such as a hotline or ticket system. We mainly rely on the excellent official Material Design documentation, the Google Developers community forums, and resources shared by other designers. It's a community-based approach, not direct customer service. At Easy Web, we manage this by ensuring that our teams are proficient with the tools and know where to look for information. Rely on the community and the documentation, not on dedicated customer service.
What do other users think?
In our discussions with other agencies and designers, most praise its simplicity and effectiveness for Material-friendly palettes. The integration of accessibility rules (the famous contrast!) is often highlighted as a huge plus. The downside, for some, is that it can sometimes lack flexibility for very "out of the box" creations that fall outside Material standards. But for a solid and consistent foundation, the consensus is very positive.
Can I easily change later?
Absolutely. That's one of the major strengths of the Material Design Color Tool. When you define your primary and secondary colors, the tool generates a harmonized palette. By integrating these definitions via CSS variables or design tokens, changing a primary color instantly propagates to all components that use it. You don't have to redo everything manually. Trust me, at Easy Web, this rapid iteration capability has saved us on many complex projects. You gain agility and consistency.
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Specializing in business creation, sales and digital marketing, he puts his expertise at the service of users to help them identify the solutions best suited to their needs. Passionate about digital innovation and online performance optimization, Alexis is committed to providing detailed, transparent and unbiased comparisons.
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