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Discussion on: Generate and Set Pseudorandom Hexadecimal Background Color Using JavaScript

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herrfugbaum profile image
Pascal

A while ago I played around with something similar. I needed to generate a bunch of random colors but that always looked awful, so i ended up writing this little snippet:

/* @param alpha boolean
* if true a random value for the alpha channel is calculated, else alpha channel = 1 (full saturation)
*/
var randomPastelColor = function (alpha) {
  var rndm = function (f) { return Math.floor(Math.random() * f)},
  pstlfy = function (p) { return Math.round((p + 255) / 2)},
  r = pstlfy(rndm(256)),
  g = pstlfy(rndm(256)),
  b = pstlfy(rndm(256)),
  a = alpha ? rndm(11) / 10 : 1

  return 'rgba(' + r + ',' + g + ',' + b + ',' + a + ')'
}

gist.github.com/herrfugbaum/7a6530... (I didn't get the embedding working 😂)

It generates random pastel colors, which are easier on the eyes in my opinion. The trick to "pastelify" is to just take each individual value add 255 (or FF) and divide it by two ✨