Sweet Color Pickers You May Not Know About

Jan 29th, 08 | 5 remarks

Color can be one of the most inspiring elements of human life. It’s around us at all times, and has the ability to invoke a range of emotions. A few months back I wrote a post on tools for color lovers. Well, here are a few more that have caught my attention recently.

Discover photos by color

Ok Flickr fanatics may already know of this, but I use Flickr pretty often and just discovered it. It’s an experimental color picker by Krazydad which allows you to find Flickr images by color. Clicking any color on the wheel will display random photos from the Flickr database, and clicking that photo will take you to the appropriate page for more info. Browse by a variety of tags, such as color fields or textures.

Design by color

Colorsontheweb.com has a good app for picking out and matching colors, called The Color Wizard. Drop in a base color (not unlike Kuler) and let the wizard churn out a scheme for you based on your selection of monochromatic, triadic, complimentary, etc.

Genopal offers another online app which immediately stands apart from most pickers we’re used to seeing, because it groups colors together for you, helping you select the the right palette in no time. The colors generally work well together, and the utility is a cinch to use. Give it a try.

Finally there’s ColorToy, a flash-based color schemer which will generate random palettes, or one based on a color you enter. Not much to it, but it’s fast and clearly displays all the codes for the colors it generates.

Decorate by color

Behr has an awesome tool called ColorSmart, for picking the perfect color of paint for your deco project by number/name, by color, or by “inspiration” (my favorite). You can even upload your own photos of a room for previewing. I just finished painting our guest bathroom the WRONG color of green last night (was supposed to be sage but ended up a limey olive). I wish I had remembered this utility last week when we were deciding on colors.

Shop by color - really!

Do you like handmade things? Prefer rare or unusual items to mass produced stuff? Etsy is the place to go, but more interesting than what they offer is the unique way in which they do it. Check out their “color-picker” shopping tool. Not the most efficient way to shop, but fun. :)


  1. Worth Reading Today

    [...] at Design Adaptations has found some more Sweet Color Pickers for you to add to your [...]


  2. Martin Welch

    OMG seems I’m well behind the times, I’ve still been using old charts like this one:

    http://www.steves-templates.com/guide/color.gif

    Thanks for these tools, they’re going to save me a bucket load of time.


  3. Charity

    Glad you found them useful Martin! I’ve seen similar charts like that, but the pickers are way more fun. :)


  4. Bedroom

    Lovely tools there. I would love to superimpose different colors on the walls of my home to see how they would look; to match with the furniture and other stuff.


  5. Sunday Reading 10 February 2008

    [...] PHP programming. You can see the theme in action at my test blog, Sag Rising. Thanks to Charity at Design Adaptations, I’ll be able to tweak the colors a little better with the Color Wizard, a tool to find [...]

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