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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51 comments
Matt
May 26, 2009ColorRotate and Color Explorer are new to me, and they look very nice. Kudos.
FreelancerCrowd
May 26, 2009ColoRotate looks wanderful
@jeffrainey
May 26, 2009I love Kuler, but will need to checkout the others. Thanks man!
Daan
May 26, 2009Nice collection
for the iPhone, there’s cliqcliq, which is an awesome service
Black Sand
May 26, 2009Thanks for great post
Brian Reich
May 26, 2009I used Color Scheme (not listed) until Creative Suite 4 was released. I love that Kuler is fully integrated into most of the CS4 applications.
Michael
May 26, 2009Great 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
webadelic
May 26, 2009Great post, colour combos are a pain in the ass to get right. Bookmarked!
Kayla
May 26, 2009I always use ColorSchemeDesigner, but a few of the other ones look pretty cool. I’ll have to check them out. Great post, thank you.
Brian Cray
May 26, 2009My favorite would definitely be Color Schemer, but many of these are new to me!
Matt
May 26, 2009Where was this when I needed it last week!
ZJohn Ojnes
May 26, 2009ColoRotate totaqlly ROCKS. Awesome program!
RET
http://www.Privacy-Center.ent
Justin
May 26, 2009great post! Always looking for ways to bring a site together with the use of color. Thanks!
seo nh
May 26, 2009Excellent group of tools. I love the 3d view of ColorRotate. That is really helpful.
Kamrul
May 27, 2009ColoRotate looks good but to me color wizard is user friendly.
PB
May 27, 2009I used Color Scheme (not listed) until Creative Suite 4 was released. I love that Kuler is fully integrated into most of the CS4 applications.
Liora
May 27, 2009Excellent, 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.
Orggu
May 27, 2009These will help me so much in The Sims 3 interior- and outfit desing.
Flash Gamer
May 27, 2009Very good list, I didn’t know about a lot of these.
I’d add colorjack.com to the list. Great site.
mauco
May 27, 2009Out of all the 10, I’m only familiar with Colourlovers. Glad to find this list.
Henrietta of RedINKdiary
May 27, 2009Bookmarked! Thank you so much.
Toni
May 28, 2009Colour-Lovers is a great resource. I love their blog section.
Thanks for the posting!
IT Mentality
May 28, 2009Love COLOURlovers, Big fan here
Neon
May 28, 2009I agree with Flash Gamer, should definitly add ColorJack to this list. ColorSphere and it’s OSX desktop wedget are fabulous tools.
theodin
May 28, 2009wicked list of resources, thanks for sharing!
Wayy
May 28, 2009awesome list, thank you!
Casper
May 29, 2009there is great descriptions for make right colors for make any good theme for your cooperate or blogging themes, thanks.
Casper
Kate
May 29, 2009Very cool!
And one of my favorite is SoftFuse Nice Tables http://www.softfuse.com/nice-tables/ It has built-in color generator as well…
web design gold coast
June 2, 2009Thanks so much… very useful indeed!
◄IVAN►
June 15, 2009very cool!
thanX
Harsh Agrawal
June 20, 2009Thanks 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…
Anna Cesario
June 22, 2009Wow! Very cool.
Heiko Schmieder
June 26, 2009Great tool collection – bookmarked!
Thanks
fahad
August 23, 2009color combination was always a great issue for me but through these tools, I feel I can overcome them.
Honey Singh
September 8, 2009Always found of designing resources like these.
Looking forward for more resources.
Dinesh
September 23, 2009Awesome list.
Thanks for sharing.
Themescope
September 28, 2009Thanks for this, i didn’t know there were this many varieties.
rechie
October 5, 2009thanks for the blog. its very helpfull for me and for my friends. keep up the good work.
Website Design Gold Coast
October 5, 2009Great 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?
Stijn
October 19, 2009For me: http://www.colorschemer.com/ !
James Childers
November 24, 2009Check out pictaculous.com. Will generate a palate from an uploaded image…
Ashely Adams : Sticker Printing
November 25, 2009Working 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…..
Orhan
December 5, 2009A 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.
aks
December 10, 2009wow awesome collection. thanks for sharing.
Nitesh Patel @techmadly
January 31, 2010hey nice very helpful throughout and i was always confused when selecting palette
Poster Printing
February 1, 2010You 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.
engineer
February 23, 2010copaso is just awesome . . .
Alessandro
February 26, 2010Colourlovers is the best site.
Dale
March 14, 2010Never seen Kuler before, glad you mentioned it.
Jasim Muhammed
August 4, 2011I must addup one more site which has recently released. http://uicart.com it gives option to showcase userinterfaces and search with color patterns. You can search how those colors are best combined in results.
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