Color tools for the design impaired
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a designer, just a programmer and writer. So I need a bit of help with things like choosing color schemes for a site. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that make that easier. Darren’s post today about one of them reminded me that I’ve been collecting links to color tools for years, and it’s about time I rounded them up into one place.
My two favorites are at the top, but I’ve found all of these useful at one time or another:
- wellstyled: Color Scheme Generator 2: My favorite color brainstorming tool. Click on a color and it chooses six matching colors. You can choose different schemes for choosing colors (i.e. monochrome or contrasting) and can even choose the distance from your color for contrasting schemes. Another nice feature: view how your colors would look to those with various forms of colorblindness.
- Eric Meyer – Color Blender: This one’s simple, but I use it more than anything else. Enter two colors (hex or RGB) and it displays any number of in-between colors. Excellent for finding an additional color or two for a site that already has a color scheme, or for modifying an existing scheme when you just want it a bit lighter or darker (blend with #FFFFFF or #000000).
- ColorMatch Remixed: Nice and simple: use the RGB sliders to choose a color, and it picks nine complementary colors (some shades of your color, some shades of a contrasting color, and greys)
- Color Harmonies: Non-JavaScript. Enter three RGB values and an array of colors is generated. These are mostly contrasting colors rather than shades of your color.
- SlayerOffice – Color Palette Creator 1.6: Enter a color (hex) and it produces nine variant colors. These are strictly shades of your color, mixed first with white and then with black.
- VisiBone Webmaster’s Color Lab: Click on a color in the palette and it displays a selection of contrasting colors (often very contrasting!)
- Web Color Theory: This one doesn’t choose colors for you. Instead, it lets you drag colors from the palette onto a sample page layout to see how they will look.
- Color Schemer: Click on a color (or enter one) and it displays a grid of 16 complementary and contrasting colors.
- If these aren’t enough, ScriptyGoddess has an entire color tools category with many more links.
And if you want to learn how to choose colors rather than have a tool do it for you, here are some general articles I found helpful:
- Mezzoblue: Colour Schemes: A look at different methods of choosing colors from a design perspective.
- Boxes and Arrows: Natural Selections: An article on selecting colors from nature, with photographic examples.
- Web Page Design for Designer: Colour: Another look at color and selecting colors from nature.
- moreCrayons – Web-Smart Palette: Introduces a 4096-color palette that degrades well on older browsers as an alternative to the antiquated 216-color palette.
<a href="http://www.figby.com/archives/2005/01/12/color-tools-for-the-design-impaired/">Un elenco dei più popolari “Generatori di colore”</a>. [...]If you need some <a href="http://www.figby.com/archives/2005/01/12/color-tools-for-the-design-impaired/">colour ideas</a> this is an excellent place to start. Very handy for ge [...]