10 Super Useful Tools for Choosing the Right Color Palette
Whether you are designing a clean corporate website or a grunge portfolio site, color is going to play a major role in how the design is perceived by the audience. That’s why it’s important to get the colors right upfront. There are plenty of tools out there made especially for this, but like anything else some are better than others. Here are 10 color tools that I think are exceptionally useful.
ColoRotate
As well as being a useful way to choose colors, ColoRotate looks cool and is actually fun to use. Instead of using two dimensional viewers, it presents color palettes to you in 3d and in real time.
Kuler
Kuler is a community driven web app that lets your browse color palettes created by others. You can also create your own by using the color wheel, harmony rules, and color sliders.
Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer has been around for a while, but was just recently updated with a brand new interface and a new color scheme generating engine.
COLOURlovers
COLOURlovers provides more than just a way to find color palettes. It is also a place to network with other people to discuss color related topics, and read interesting articles about all things color.
Copaso
Copaso is COLOURlovers palette generating tool. It’s rich feature set allows you to save colors to a scratch pad, extract colors from a photo, and publish a palette for thousands of other people to see.
Color Blender
Color Blender let’s you select a preferred color and then it generates a six color blend based on that color. From there you can tweak each individual color.
Toucan
Toucan allows you to select up to 20 colors for each palette either by using color association or from an uploaded image.
ColorMunki
ColorMunki gives you the ability to search colors from built in libraries and using keywords.
Color Wizard
With Color Wizard you can submit a base color and it generates color schemes based on your color’s complementary color, split complementary colors, analogous colors and other variations.
Color Explorer
Color Explorer is a fairly new color palette generating tool, but boasts a well organized set of features.
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May 26, 2009
ColorRotate and Color Explorer are new to me, and they look very nice. Kudos.
May 26, 2009
ColoRotate looks wanderful
May 26, 2009
I love Kuler, but will need to checkout the others. Thanks man!
May 26, 2009
Nice collection
for the iPhone, there’s cliqcliq, which is an awesome service
May 26, 2009
Thanks for great post
May 26, 2009
I used Color Scheme (not listed) until Creative Suite 4 was released. I love that Kuler is fully integrated into most of the CS4 applications.
May 26, 2009
Great post, and well researched. These sorts of overview lists are useful for folks. Thanks for including our ColoRotate project. We added a link to your post to our media relations page:
http://about.colorotate.org/media-relations.html
May 26, 2009
Great post, colour combos are a pain in the ass to get right. Bookmarked!
May 26, 2009
I always use ColorSchemeDesigner, but a few of the other ones look pretty cool. I’ll have to check them out. Great post, thank you.
May 26, 2009
My favorite would definitely be Color Schemer, but many of these are new to me!
May 26, 2009
Where was this when I needed it last week!
May 26, 2009
ColoRotate totaqlly ROCKS. Awesome program!
RET
http://www.Privacy-Center.ent
May 26, 2009
great post! Always looking for ways to bring a site together with the use of color. Thanks!
May 26, 2009
Excellent group of tools. I love the 3d view of ColorRotate. That is really helpful.
May 27, 2009
ColoRotate looks good but to me color wizard is user friendly.
May 27, 2009
I used Color Scheme (not listed) until Creative Suite 4 was released. I love that Kuler is fully integrated into most of the CS4 applications.
May 27, 2009
Excellent, comprehensive list that covers all possible color options. I have used Color Lovers in the past and adore the way they display their swatches and combos.
May 27, 2009
These will help me so much in The Sims 3 interior- and outfit desing.
May 27, 2009
Very good list, I didn’t know about a lot of these.
I’d add colorjack.com to the list. Great site.
May 27, 2009
Out of all the 10, I’m only familiar with Colourlovers. Glad to find this list.
May 27, 2009
Bookmarked! Thank you so much.
May 28, 2009
Colour-Lovers is a great resource. I love their blog section.
Thanks for the posting!
May 28, 2009
Love COLOURlovers, Big fan here
May 28, 2009
I agree with Flash Gamer, should definitly add ColorJack to this list. ColorSphere and it’s OSX desktop wedget are fabulous tools.
May 28, 2009
wicked list of resources, thanks for sharing!
May 28, 2009
awesome list, thank you!
May 29, 2009
there is great descriptions for make right colors for make any good theme for your cooperate or blogging themes, thanks.
Casper
May 29, 2009
Very cool!
And one of my favorite is SoftFuse Nice Tables http://www.softfuse.com/nice-tables/ It has built-in color generator as well…
Jun 2, 2009
Thanks so much… very useful indeed!
Jun 15, 2009
very cool!
thanX
Jun 20, 2009
Thanks a lot for useful post. Most of them are online tools, which one is the best tool for desktop?
Moreover plz enable subscribe to comment. I need to follow this thread…
Jun 22, 2009
Wow! Very cool.
Jun 26, 2009
Great tool collection – bookmarked!
Thanks
Aug 23, 2009
color combination was always a great issue for me but through these tools, I feel I can overcome them.
Sep 8, 2009
Always found of designing resources like these.
Looking forward for more resources.
Sep 23, 2009
Awesome list.
Thanks for sharing.
Sep 28, 2009
Thanks for this, i didn’t know there were this many varieties.
Oct 5, 2009
thanks for the blog. its very helpfull for me and for my friends. keep up the good work.
Oct 5, 2009
Great tools for when I’m not on my computer.
Thanks for the list.
Do any of the sites have accounts where you can save your colour selections and come back to them later?
Oct 19, 2009
For me: http://www.colorschemer.com/ !
Nov 24, 2009
Check out pictaculous.com. Will generate a palate from an uploaded image…
[...] Adobe’s Kuler is a community driven web app that lets your browse color palettes created by others. You can also create your own by using the color wheel, harmony rules, and color sliders. There are also other tools to help you choose the right colors. [...]
Nov 25, 2009
Working with colors will now be more fun thanks to this compilation….a wrong choice of color combination can ruin all your efforts…these tools will be a great help not only in mixing and matching colors but also in choosing the exact shade…..
Dec 5, 2009
A very helpful post. I knew up to now only Kuler. The alternatives very feel also well. Above all colorschemedesigner. It is very friendly to operator.
Dec 10, 2009
wow awesome collection. thanks for sharing.
Jan 31, 2010
hey nice very helpful throughout and i was always confused when selecting palette
Feb 1, 2010
You are so right! Getting the color right the first time is very important. Everything from poster printing to brochure printing relies so heavily on the perfect color choice. And there is virtually no way to choose the right color tools without a guide like this one. Thanks for the tips.
[...] Here you will find inspiration in many different subjects of web design – such as typography, colors scheme, textures, layouts, images disposal and so on. So sit back and enjoy these pretty inspiring [...]
Feb 23, 2010
copaso is just awesome . . .
Feb 26, 2010
Colourlovers is the best site.