March 28, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toucan allows you to select up to 20 colors for each palette either by using color association or from an uploaded image.

ColorMunki

ColorMunki

ColorMunki gives you the ability to search colors from built in libraries and using keywords.

Color Wizard

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

Color Explorer is a fairly new color palette generating tool, but boasts a well organized set of features.

Henry Jones is a web developer, designer, and entrepreneur with over 14 years of experience. He is the founder of WDL and ThemeTrust.

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63 Comments

  1. Kayla Reply

    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.

  2. PB Reply

    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.

  3. Liora Reply

    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.

  4. Neon Reply

    I agree with Flash Gamer, should definitly add ColorJack to this list. ColorSphere and it’s OSX desktop wedget are fabulous tools.

  5. Harsh Agrawal Reply

    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…

  6. Orhan Reply

    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.

  7. Poster Printing Reply

    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.

  8. Gaurav Kumar Reply

    Choosing the right color is the job that makes me eat my mind sometimes. When selecting a color, I prefer to achieve perfection, and it is not the easy thing to do. Thanks for the tools that are available these days to make this job easy for me. Keep sharing.

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