Colour Schemes

I have spent this week struggling with colour schemes for my blog. I found deciding on a colour scheme to be an incredibly frustrating process, and what I finally settled on was fairly safe but not very original or exciting either.

However here are a few of the tools that I used to help me locate colours, palettes and inspiration, hopefully this can be useful to you too.

The following websites offer options to create color schemes of your own, or access pre-generated color schemes and palettes that have been suggested by other members of the site or uploaded by the maintainers of the website.

Adobe Kulur

My favorite because of the great community. A lot of really good palettes here and plenty of things to help you designing. Kulur refers to both the website and the AIR application which you can download here.

The AIR application has a useful feature of letting you drag schemes separately onto your desktop to compare various palettes. Once you have decided you can copy the RGB values straight onto the clipboard.

Colour Browser

Another AIR application, this one doesn’t need to be connected to the Internet and is useful as a desktop tool for storing various palettes and schemes. This tool is for creating your own palettes, not finding other peoples and is pretty simple but useful.

Color Scheme Generator 2

A color wheel you can use to create a palette from, has a number of options such as pastel, dark pastel, contrast pale etc.

ColorSchemer ColorPix

ColorPix is great. Install it and you can use it to find out what color anything on your screen is. Perfect for stealing someone else’s great scheme or creating variations. If used in conjunction with the Colour Schemer Gallery then you can really find some great ideas.

Update: The Adobe Air applications are no longer listed on the Adobe website. We have removed the links that were pointing to them from this article.

Design Seeds

Design Seeds is a great website where color palettes are posted regularly on. Each color palette has a name attached to it, the colors that it consists of, and a photo that highlights those colors.

You can use a search to find specific schemes you are looking for, including selecting a base color that you want to work with and want included in all hits you get.

Or, you can search by theme like Autumn, Winter, Vintage or Nature instead and see what comes up there. Just hover on any color and you get the code for it right away.

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