20 Amazingly Easy to Use Color Tools for Designers

June 1st, 2010 Posted in Tools

Taking the time to choose and test the colors that mesh well with your web or print project can go wrong if you’re not familiar with color theory and/or which colors can be combined. Because choosing the right color for your design is so vital, for the most part, a large chunk of designers take this very seriously (as you should too).

This is why we’ve put together this awesome list of 20 color tools for designers. It will allow you to select and test a variety of colors for all of your future projects.

Contrast-A

This application allows users to experiment with color combinations, examine them under the aspect of accessibility guidelines and to create custom color palettes.

Adobe Kuler

Adobe Kuler is a web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

Check My Color

CheckMyColours is a tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits.

COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers is a creative community where people from around the world create
and share colors, palettes and patterns, discuss the latest trends and explore colorful
articles… All in the spirit of love.

Colorotate

Color Combos

Combo Tester allows web developers to see how different color combinations work together on the screen.

Toucan Color Palettes

Toucan gives you the features you need to inject color into your creative process.

ColorJack

ColorJack is a great color selection tool that lets you export palleates in Illustrator, Photoshop, Sphere and URL formats for better flexibility and use of the colors.

Unsafe Colormatch

Web pages use RGB colors, but for a color wheel you need HSL colors. Unfortunately there’s no standard definition for computing HSL from RGB and back again. Unsafe Colormatch uses an algoritm supplied by Microsoft to show you which colors do not mesh well together.

Color Hunter

Color Hunter is a place to find and make color palettes created from images. To find color palettes on Color Hunter, enter a search term in the box at the top of the page. You can search by tag or hex color code or image URL. If you have an image, you can upload it and get a color palette based on the colors in the image.

Daily Colorscheme

Daily Color Scheme.com is all about color. Every day color. We serve a new colorschemeevery day of the year, to keep the designers head fueled with inspirational and usable color schemes.
We try our best to make this website as usable and accesible as possible, we like to browse fast, not wasting any time.

Color Palette Software

COPASO is an advanced color palette tool that helps you create the perfect color palette. If you’re finding COPASO a bit too rich for your color creating tastes, you can always use their basic color palette tool.

ColorExplorer

ColorExplorer is an online toolbox for working with color palettes. With ColorExplorer you can quickly and easily create, manage and evaluate color palettes for use in graphic design, web designs, layouts, and much more.

ColourMod

ColourMod originally made its debut as one of the most flexible, not to mention, good looking, DHTML Dynamic Color Pickers out there. Since then ColourMod has become even more robust, with room to expand beyond imagination.

ColourGrab

This app lets you type the URL of any online image below and our system will tell you the most used colours from that image, and as a result give you some inspirtation!

Pictaculous

With Pictaculous you can upload your image and analyze its colors. This is perfect for those designers that would like to distinguish the looks of a graphic without having to manually choose the best combining colors every time.

Color Cell

This is an experimental website about colors. Colorcell wants to find the most popular color combinations.

ColorBlender

Web 2.0 Colour Palette

Now you can quickly and easily assemble your own colour scheme – simply choose any number of bold or muted colours, then add as many neutrals as you see fit – you’ll have a Web2.0 masterpiece in no time at all!

ColorZilla

ColorZilla is an extension for Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite. It assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks – both basic and advanced. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program.

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Author - GrindSmart Media

who has written 28 posts on [Re]Encoded.com.

GrindSmart Magazine is an adventurous blog that focuses on web development articles within a wide range of topics which aim to inform and challenge the minds. Follow GrindSmart on Twitter here.
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One Response to “20 Amazingly Easy to Use Color Tools for Designers”

  1. Hilde Says:

    Thanks for a great post Joel! Definitely gonna try out a couple that I havent heard before. Until now, Kuler is my favorite by far. I use it almost daily. I especially love how you can take colors from an image and make a scheme, very useful for many design purposes.
    Thanks! :)


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