Below are some handy web tools to help you choose the perfect colors for your designs. This post follows up on a Mashable post published close to three years ago called "COLORS TOOLBOX: 20+ Tools For Working With Colors," which you should also check out for even more color tools to add to your design arsenal.
Developing Color Palettes
1. ColoRotate – This web-based color palette generator is a fun and visually appealing method for putting together your color combinations. You can explore and tweak preexisting color palettes for inspiration, or create your own. You can also view color palettes in a variety of ways to give you a greater perspective on how well your colors work together.
2. COPASO – This web tool is a feature rich and advanced color palette generator created by COLOURlovers, a leading site for designers looking for color inspiration. The tool lets you develop color palettes that you can assign meta data information on to (such as keyword tags and a related URL) for easy searching and organization. You can attach a photo to your workspace to draw colors from, which can be handy if you already have a good picture of the color scheme you want to create.
3. ColorMunki Design – This palette generator gives you various options for choosing colors. You can select colors from established color systems, such as Pantone, choose colors from images and photos, or find user-generated color palettes. They have a built-in feature for sharing your color palettes that can prove useful for times when you're seeking peer feedback about your color choices.
4. Toucan – Developed by popular web-based graphics editor software makers, Aviary, Toucan is a user-friendly web tool for creating color schemes. It has a color wheel for more precise selection of colors as well as an image picker feature that lets users sample colors from a photo using an eyedropper.
5. Palette Man – This basic but highly useful color palette generator allows you to pick a certain color theme (such as "Romantic" or "Industrial") that you can use as starting points for your color palettes.
6. Pictaculous – This simple tool will automatically generate a color palette for you based on an image that you upload, helping you find out which colors an image uses. This could be a quick method for developing a color scheme based on a website design screenshot or scanned copies of a company's printed material.
Finding and Exploring Colors
7. 0to255 – This intuitive web tool gives you the opportunity to explore variations of certain selected colors. This is a wonderful web app for getting exactly the right shade of color that you want.
8. ColorPicker.com – This tool only does one thing, but it does it well: it puts the color picker feature that you often find in many graphics editor such as Photoshop and GIMP, on the web. In a pinch, this tool can be of aid to designers needing access to this frequently used graphics editor feature.
9. ColorSuckr – If you find an inspiring image on the web that you want to extract colors from, ColorSuckr is just the tool that will get it done. All you have to do is supply the URL of the image and it'll detect the colors within it, along with the colors' hexadecimal, RGB and closest web-safe hexadecimal color codes.
10. Cymbolism – Color is a powerful tool for evoking emotional responses from its audience. For example, in most cultures, red is a symbol of danger and excitement. Cymbolism is a social experiment that presents its users a word and asks them to choose the color that they think represents that word. This gives designers developing color schemes a better way of picking colors based on words and subjects they intend to convey in a design project. The words directory displays the associated colors that people most commonly pick for a particular word.
11. Name that Color – Do you constantly ask yourself questions like, "Is this Royal Blue or Navy Blue?" If so, use this tool to learn what name (approximately) best describes a particular color.
12. 500+ Named Colour – This crib sheet lists color names and their associated RGB and hexadecimal color codes; it can be handy when writing descriptions or presenting your color choices to your clients and colleagues.
Checking Colors for Accessibility
13. Check My Colours – Poor color contrast affects readability. This easy-to-use web tool checks a website's foreground and background color combinations. All you have to do is plug in the URL of a web page, and in turn, it'll output a report showing page elements that don't meet color contrast standards recommended by the W3C.
14. Luminosity Colour Contrast Ratio Analyser – This tool allows you to input the hexadecimal color codes of your foreground and background color, then runs a luminosity contrast algorithm recommended in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 from the W3C. This simple tool saves you from having to pull out a calculator and trying to remember the math lessons you had in high school.
Color Inspiration
15. Multicolr Search Lab – This web tool will show you a grid of photo thumbnails that embody the colors you pick. Photos come from a selection of 10 million interesting images from Flickr's Creative Commons. This excellent tool is for discovering inspiring images based on colors that interest you.
16. Daily Color Scheme – Every day, this web resource is updated with an inspiring color palette that you can use in your design and art projects. Each color palette displays hexadecimal, RGB, and HSB color codes for your convenience in case you find a color theme that you want utilize out of the box or tweak on your own.
17. Colr Pickr – Colr Pickr is a useful tool for designers and photo editors looking for inspiring images based on certain colors. The tool presents you with Flickr photos of a certain subject (such as flowers or graffiti) that match the color you choose. It's a great way to surround yourself with inspiring photos of a given color.
Which web tools do you use for working with color?
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