The 80s Color Palette, With Hex Codes and Where Each Color Came From

Around 1981, a designer named Leonard Horowitz repainted Friedman's Bakery on Miami Beach, an all-white 1930s building, in soft pastels. Local reactions ranged from skeptical to horrified. The bakery made the cover of Progressive Architecture in November 1982. Miami Vice didn't premiere until September 1984. So the colors everyone calls "Miami Vice pastels" were on South Beach first, and the show found them there.

Most "80s color palette" pages skip that part. They give you six hex codes and no idea where the colors came from, and half the time the palette is really from the synthwave revival that started twenty-some years later. Below are six color families the decade really had, each with its own origin story, plus the revival palette that gets mistaken for them. None of them came with official hex codes, since nobody published a Miami Vice or Memphis swatch book, so the values below are our picks for screens. The CGA palette is the exception. Those hex codes are documented.

1. South Beach pastels

Horowitz co-founded the Miami Design Preservation League with Barbara Baer Capitman in the mid-70s, and the Miami Beach Art Deco District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. His pastel scheme was a way to draw the eye to the Deco details and keep the buildings from being torn down. He pulled the colors from sunrise, sunset, the ocean in summer and winter, and the sand. The National Park Service names peach, aqua, seafoam green and shell pink. Today the city still requires light pastels in the district.

2. Miami Vice

When the show arrived, executive producer Michael Mann kept earth tones out of the frame. Director Bobby Roth later recalled that red and brown were off limits, down to the cars: if a script called for a Mercedes, the options were white, black or silver. The rule loosened in season three, which went darker, and season four drifted back toward pastels. The show shot a lot of it at night, under neon.

If you want to wear this palette instead of just using it, a pink camp collar shirt like the Miami Flamingo Shirt ($39.99) over white trousers is about as on-model as it gets.

3. Memphis

In December 1980, the designer Ettore Sottsass gathered a group of young designers in his Milan apartment. A Bob Dylan record kept playing, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," and the group named itself after it. Their first collection showed in Milan in September 1981: furniture in cheap plastic laminate, bright colors, zigzags and squiggles, like Sottsass's Carlton bookcase. One critic called it "a shotgun wedding between Bauhaus and Fisher-Price." Karl Lagerfeld furnished an apartment with it. David Bowie collected it.

Memphis wasn't all neon. It mixed pastels, primaries and black-and-white patterns, and that mix still works on a T-shirt. Our Memphis Wave T-Shirt ($39.99) borrows exactly that mix.

4. Neon and fluorescent

The glowing colors go back to two brothers in Berkeley, Robert and Joseph Switzer, who started playing with fluorescent paint in the 1930s. In the 1940s they developed pigments that glow in regular daylight by turning ultraviolet light into visible color, and the company became Day-Glo Color Corp. in 1969. In fashion, the early 80s were more subdued, and by the middle and late part of the decade neon was everywhere, helped along by aerobics clothes. Real fluorescent colors are brighter than any screen can show, so the hex codes are the closest a monitor can get.

5. The Nagel look

Patrick Nagel's women, flat and pale with black hair and red lips, ran in Playboy until 1984 and stayed on dentist office walls for the rest of the decade. His style borrowed from Japanese woodblock prints and 1920s and 30s Art Deco: strong black and white shapes, simple lines, almost no shading. He painted the cover of Duran Duran's Rio, released May 10, 1982, and died in February 1984. His publisher kept printing his posters long after.

6. The computer screen (these hex codes are real)

IBM's CGA graphics card came out with the IBM PC in 1981 and could show 16 colors. In its 320 by 200 graphics mode, though, it only showed four at a time: a background, usually black, plus three fixed colors. The famous set is palette 1 at high intensity: light cyan, light magenta and white. If an old DOS game looks cyan and pink in your memory, this is why.

The Commodore 64, which went on sale in August 1982 for $595, also had 16 colors, but its colors were analog video signals, so every published hex set is someone's measurement. One common set lists its blue as #50459B and its light blue as #887ECB, the colors of the C64 start-up screen.

7. Synthwave (which isn't from the 80s)

The palette most people now call "80s" is magenta and cyan on black, a striped sunset, a glowing grid and chrome letters. Almost none of that came as a set in the 80s. Synthwave as a music style took shape in the mid to late 2000s with French producers, and the 2011 film Drive, with its hot pink titles borrowed from Risky Business, put it in front of everyone. The pieces came from real 80s sources. Tron (1982) supplied the glowing grid, which was mostly hand-colored backlit animation, not computer graphics. Blade Runner (1982) supplied the neon rain. The name "outrun" comes from Sega's 1986 arcade game Out Run, which turned 40 in September 2026. The game itself is mostly bright blue sky and palm trees, and the sunset only shows up on the ending screen.

There's no official synthwave palette, and every palette site uses different values. Use the ones above as a starting point and adjust by eye. For wearing it, the Synthwave Sunset Hoodie 1982 ($69.99) puts the whole palette in one place.

How to use an 80s palette without making a mess

Pick one family and stay in it. Pastels want white or sand behind them. Neon wants black or deep navy, since it goes flat on white. Memphis is the one family that likes a pattern, so let it. For text, use the darkest color in the set and check it's readable, because hot pink on cyan looks great on a poster and terrible in a paragraph. For more on the fashion side, see 80s fashion colors, and if you're still sorting out synthwave from vaporwave, this explainer helps.

Questions we get

What are the main colors of the 1980s? It depends which 80s. South Beach pastels (peach, aqua, seafoam, shell pink), Memphis brights (yellow, red, cobalt, mint with black and white), neon and fluorescent (pink, green, yellow, orange) and the black-and-white-and-red Nagel look were all real at the time.

Were the Miami Vice pastels invented for the show? No. Leonard Horowitz was repainting Miami Beach buildings in pastels around 1981 and 1982. The show premiered in 1984 and made them famous.

What are the CGA colors in hex? The famous high-intensity palette 1 is black #000000, light cyan #55FFFF, light magenta #FF55FF and white #FFFFFF.

Is synthwave an 80s color palette? Not really. It's a 2000s and 2010s revival built from 80s pieces like Tron's grid, Blade Runner's neon and the Out Run name.

Is there an official synthwave hex palette? No. Every site publishes its own. The values here are our picks.

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