Autogenerate project hex color

I'm hoping to take something like 'Project 1' and get a hex color for easy visual differentiation. I can convert binary to hex, but the range of values isn't very good. I tried a couple hash functions and I'm finding a similar issue. Almost nothing in the upper range of values. Seems like something that should be fairly simple, but I'm not familiar enough with hashing algos to know what kind of a spread I can expect from a similar length and character set. It might be that I need to compress the hash result instead of just grabbing x chars from the head or tail of the resulting string.