Color Your World - Tools for Color Lovers

Selecting a color scheme could arguably be one of the most important tasks in planning and designing a website, but it’s not always the easiest. I’m a bookmark/applet/utility collector of sorts, and over the past couple years I’ve gathered a few which simplify the task of color selection a bit, and certainly make it more fun. I thought it was high time to share. All the following tools are free -check ‘em out. :)

ColorBlender is an online palette creation tool. You can blend to your heart’s content by using sliders, which automatically create a scheme of coordinating colors, or directly edit individual colors to make a palette of your own design. When your happy, you can easily export to Photoshop or Illustrator. You can also save blends to go back to later.

ColorCombos has a neat feature where you can enter any URL and it retrieves the color scheme used by that site. For me, this discovery was a huge time-saver, because I had been using ColorZilla to pick colors manually from sites I thought had a nice scheme. It was painstakingly slow. This site also has a combo test feature, where you can enter multiple hex codes to see how your colors work together side by side.

ColorJack is my favorite, and offers a slew of color picking and palette suggestion tools. The Sphere section shows you a color wheel and palette suggestion of six colors. You can make adjustments by clicking the wheel, using the sliders, or choosing from one of the drop-down formulas. The Studio will give you a whole different interface, and suggests a palette of three or more colors. Everything can be adjusted using the functions or by entering your own number values. The most fun is the Spin button, which loads a random color scheme. ColorJack also has export features.

ColorSchemer actually sells color studio software, but they also have a gallery of user created palettes you can browse for free, and a search feature where you can enter one specific color by hex, returning any palette containing that color. This is great if you have a base color in mind, but you’re having trouble finding or matching colors. The gallery is also a good source if you just need a little nudge of inspiration. :)

As a sidenote, an ever-present source of inspiration for choosing a palette can be found in your very own photos. Here are some great examples of color schemes drawn directly from a variety of photos.

Tags: color | tools | utilities