Search This Blog

Friday, January 6, 2012

10 Resources for Creating Website Color Schemes


Choosing the right color scheme is one of the most important decisions of the website design process, and it can also be one of the most challenging. Fortunately, there are a number of great tools available to help with color selection.
Some of the resources mentioned in this post will allow you to browse through a variety of color palettes or schemes, many will allow you to create and save your own color schemes, and some are interactive, allowing you to quickly create an effective color scheme.

Kuler

Adobe’s Kuler includes a large library of user-submitted color schemes. You can view the color schemes online or download them to be used in Adobe Creative Suite products.
Kuler

Colour Lovers

Colour Lovers currently has almost 2 million color palettes created by its users. You can browse palettes by submission date, rating, views, and comments, or you can search by keyword.
Colour Lovers

ColoRotate

ColoRotate has a library of color schemes that you can browse, or you can create your own with their unique 3D tool. You can use it directly in Photoshop and Fireworks with the ColoRotate plugin.
ColoRotate

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer allows you to choose the type of scheme that you want to use (mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic, or accented analogic). You then adjust one of the colors on the wheel and the other colors will adjust as well, helping to create an appropriate color scheme.
Color Scheme Designer

ColorSchemer Gallery

ColorSchemer has a large library of user-created color schemes. You can browse by submission date, rating, or number of downloads, or you can search by keyword.
ColorSchemer Gallery

Pictaculous

Pictaculous is a simple online tool for generating a color scheme. You can upload a photo and it will suggest colors to use with the photo. You can then download the Adobe swatch of the suggested colors.
Pictaculous

Color Spire

Color Spire is fairly simple to use. You select a starting color and it will suggest a palette of colors to use in combination. It also provides a basic preview to show how the colors would look on a sample website layout.
Color Spire

ColorExplorer

ColorExplorer includes a few different color tools. With the color picker you can select a color and see different variations. You can also view color libraries and use the color matching tool to help create a palette.
ColorExplorer

ColourGrab

ColourGrab is a simple tool that allows you to get colors from a picture that is online. Just enter the URL of the image and it will show which colors are used most in the photo.
ColourGrab

Sphere: Color Theory Visualizer

With Sphere you can adjust one of the colors in the scheme and the others will automatically adjust to match. You can try different types of color schemes like analogous, complementary, triadic, tetradic, and more.
Sphere: Color Theory Visualizer

No comments:

Post a Comment

Entireweb