15 Tools To Help You Find The Perfect Color Palette
July 21, 2010 | Thoughts & Words By Paul Maloney | 16 Comments
When designing a website or any other printed media a whole array of elements are vital to the overall look and feel of the project, if any of these aspects are incorrect or poorly thought out the project can suffer. Colour is one of these important parts of design. When choosing colour your initial reaction is "do these colours work together?” after that you have to consider things like accessibility. There are a number of online tools that can assist you with putting together a great palette. I have rounded up 15 such tools that can help you with colour selection, suitability and accessibility for your web and graphic design projects.
This site checks the colours used on your site and discovers how accessible it is to users with any colour deficits.
Pictaculous allows you to upload an image and the site fetches a colour palette from the colours used in the uploaded file.
Each day this site provides its readers with a fresh colour scheme each day which can be saved and downloaded to your own machine in multiple files formats.
You can use the wheel to discover web safe colours for your project, you can also download your palette once compete.
I Like Your Colors grabs the colours used by the site that referred you or you can enter a URL in the form on page to see the colours for a particular URL.
This well know Abode tool has a huge collection of user generated pallets which you can download, you can also sign up and add your own.
Colour Lovers is a community driven haven for colour lovers everywhere, there are over 300k users sharing over 1 million palettes.
Does what it says on the tin, offers you 100 random colours, each page reload will offer you 100 new colours.
This offers the ability to select your own colours from a wheel and save them into your own palette.
Browse and create your own palettes using a slick 3D "wheel", it has numerous options such as blend, hue and tint.
ColorSpire uses a colour wheel to offer a scheme for colour co-ordinating your webpage layout.
Using the huge sphere you can make your own palette which can be exporting to Illustrator and Photoshop for example.
This is an online tool for matching and blending your palettes, it can work from one colour and offer suitable matches.
ColorHunter will discover colours used in online images or uploaded images which then are placed into your favourites for later use.
This easy to use tool will discover variations of a certain colour, which can be handy when using for gradients and borders.
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Thanks Paul. Color Scheme Designer looks good but then again, so do they all. I’ve used a very simple on in the past but will have to give these a try. Thanks for sharing and compiling the list, I know it takes time.
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Your most welcome Aaron! Color Scheme Designer is pretty cool, I also find Check My Colours very useful too
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Really nice selection you’ve made there
This could definitely be useful. I actually really like the one 0to255. It is a great one if you are looking for variations of one colour. Thanks for the time and effort.
Color scheme tools are a great help for non designers like me. Thanks for the list.
all great suggestions, throughly enjoyed this list you’ve put together. Definitely one to bookmark and revisit when needed
Hi,
there is another tool, a color picker tool that was not mentioned and can be really useful, due to its simplicity.
It allows you to add color to a palette and then save this palette or download it in .ACT format for using it with photoshop.
Interesting!
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Impressive resources. Thanks.
Colour Lovers is my favourite. I used it to get colour inspirations.
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Great post, I had not even heard of some of those services so thank you! I use Kuler a lot, a fantastic resource with the amount of community generated colour schemes and also the ability to advise and create your own.
I’ve been using Kuler for the last 2 years
Thanks for the list!
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I have just discovered this blog. One of the best design blogs I have seen! Thanks
Great article. These color scheme tools are really helpful.
Thanks for sharing.
Paul, a new color websites on the block is http://colorpilgrim.com – cool place to pick color combinations.