Contrary to what many believe, picking a color scheme for a web site that you are working on is not easy, especially when you are designing one site after another. You have to diversify the colors of your web designs and you also have to keep the color scheme balanced. You don’t want some weird color combinations to ruin your site just because you think they look good. The tools that you have in this article can help you create a balanced color scheme and some have a lot of options to choose from and even premade color schemes.
ColoRotate
Like taste and smell, color is a sense that is processed by our brains in multiple dimensions. (Visit our ”Learn about color” section for more information.) Yet traditional methods of choosing colors on computers are limited to obscure sliders and flattened two-dimensional viewers. With ColoRotate, you can work with colors in 3D, in real time, and in a way that matches how our minds process color.
Sphere: Color Theory Visualizer
Kuler
Discover Adobe® Kuler® — the web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.
CONTRAST-A-WEB V2.0
The application allows users to experiment with color combinations, examine them under the aspect of accessibility guidelines and to create custom color palettes.
Contrast-A checks color combinations for sufficient contrast and displays the results according to WCAG 2.0 (Luminance Ratio) as well as the results according to older accessibility guidelines, WCAG 1.0 (Difference in Brightness and Color).
Colllor
With Colllor it is much easier to generate a consistent color palette with just a few clicks. You should use colors consistently, so you have a common look and feel throughout your design. All the alternative proposals produced by Colllor derive from the same color and they all have a common denominator sharing hue, lightness or saturation values. This tool will let you find the exact value of darker shades of any color, not just something that ‘looks darker’. That will be a huge step towards professionally looking color combinations.
Color Palettes
Used alone or in conjunction with our other creation tools, Toucan gives you the features you need to inject color into your creative process.
ColorExplorer
Simply put, ColorExplorer is an online toolbox for working with color palettes. Being a little more elaborate, the current site is the result of evolvement on my acclaimed ColorMatch 5K project dating back as far as 2001.
With ColorExplorer you can quickly and easily create, manage and evaluate color palettes for use in graphic design, web designs, layouts, and much more.
Colorspire
Colormunki
COPASO : Color Palette Software
COPASO is an advanced color palette tool that helps you create the perfect color palette. You can check out colourlovers.com for color palletes inspiration.
Colour Combinations Tester
Genopal
ColorToy 2.0 – The Flash Color Scheme Generator
ColorToy 2.0 is a Flash based color scheme generator and picker. It generates complementary color schemes based on your inputted color values or randomly, which is much more fun.
Colrd
ColorSchemer – Online Color Scheme Generator
Color Scheme Designer 3
ColorZilla for Firefox
ColorZilla for Firefox is an add-on that assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks – both basic and advanced.
With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can analyze the page and inspect a palette of its colors. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily. You can create advanced multi-stop CSS gradients.
Color Hunter
Color Hunter is a place to find and make color palettes created from images. To find color palettes on Color Hunter, enter a search term in the box at the top of the page. You can search by tag or hex color code or image URL. If you have an image, you can upload it and get a color palette based on the colors in the image.
ColourGrab
ColourGrab is about er.. colours! Type a URL of any online image below and our system will tell you the most used colours from that image, and as a result give you some inspiration
Pictaculous
CheckMyColours
It is a tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits.
Color Wizard
The color wizard lets you submit your own base color, and it automatically returns matching colors for the one you selected.
It returns a set of hue, saturation and tint/shade variations of your color, as well as suggests color schemets to you, based on your color’s complementary color, split complementary colors, analogous colors and other variations. The color wizard also has a randomize function that lets you generate color schemes you might not have thought of on your own.
YS Instant Color Picker
With Instant Color Picker (ICP), you can quickly pick colors from screen and store them. ICP is a designer’s best friend!
Color Palette Generator
I like to give people the ability to do things they wouldn’t normally be able to do. I like to take a fuzzy task and make it clear for the user. I want the user to finish the task quickly and easily but still let them have that proud feeling of, “Hey look what I just did!” The goal of DeGraeve.com is to provide free, high-quality, web-based tools that are easy to use for all users.
Cubecolors
