Discord Color Codes: Embed, Role and Brand Colors

Why Discord wants a decimal color

A color is three bytes — red, green and blue — and Discord keeps it as the single number they make: red × 65,536 + green × 256 + blue. Blurple, #5865F2, is 88 × 65,536 + 101 × 256 + 242 = 5,793,266. Code can write the same number as the hex literal 0x5865F2, but JSON has no hex notation, so a webhook's body carries the decimal: in a classic embed's color field, and in a Components V2 container's accent_color.

Leave accent_color out for a container with no colored stripe. The two payloads below are separate messages, because a Components V2 message cannot also carry embeds.

{
  "embeds": [{ "title": "A classic embed", "color": 5793266 }]
}

{
  "flags": 32768,
  "components": [
    {
      "type": 17,
      "accent_color": 5793266,
      "components": [{ "type": 10, "content": "A Components V2 container" }]
    }
  ]
}

Discord's brand colors

Discord's branding page lists three colors today: Blurple, Light Blurple and Black. The brighter green, yellow, fuchsia and red of its 2021 palette are no longer on that page, but discord.js and discord.py still name them, so they turn up in bots everywhere. The blurple Discord used before its 2021 rebrand, #7289DA (7,506,394), survives as discord.py's og_blurple().

Discord role color presets

The role color picker in Server Settings offers twenty swatches: ten colors and a darker shade of each. Discord shows them without names, so the names here are only descriptive. A role with no color of its own is stored as 0 and shows as #99AAB5 (10,070,709), and any hex code works if none of the presets fits.

discord.js and discord.py color names

Both libraries ship named colors, and they disagree in places that bite: discord.js Colors.Green is the bright 2021 brand green #57F287 while discord.py's Colour.green() is the role picker's #2ECC71, discord.js Red is #ED4245 against discord.py red()'s #E74C3C, and each library's grey names point at different shades. Match on the hex, not the name. discord.py also offers the app's theme backgrounds (ash_theme(), dark_theme() and so on); they are background shades rather than accents, so they are not listed here.

Convert between hex and decimal in code

Every language that talks to Discord can do the conversion in one call, and both libraries also accept the literal directly.

// JavaScript
parseInt("5865F2", 16);       // 5793266
(5793266).toString(16);       // "5865f2"
0x5865f2;                     // 5793266

# Python
int("5865F2", 16)             # 5793266
f"{5793266:06X}"              # '5865F2'
0x5865F2                      # 5793266

Picking an accent color that works

Accent colors are a Container setting in the Components V2 guide, and the embed builder shows how a classic embed's color carries over when you convert it.

• The stripe is narrow, so saturated colors read best. Very pale ones such as Light Blurple almost vanish on the Light theme, and very dark ones on Dark and Onyx.
• Keep one color per purpose — rules, announcements, alerts — so members learn what a stripe means at a glance.
• Color is a cue, not the message: say it in the text as well, for readers who cannot tell the colors apart.
• To color the words themselves, use an ansi code block — the colored text generator writes one for you.