Editor’s note: This post was written by Shah, who writes about web design & development. If you want know about more useful tools for web design or more tips & ideas for web development, designews.org is the place for you to see what has been shared for design, creativity & inspiration hungry audience. You can join Shah on Google+.
Designing a website is a long process that consists of many stages. People are trying various options to create quality sites like wordpress or free website builders like website-builder.com, Imcreator etc. But one of the essential stages of website design is picking a color scheme. This is probably one of the important decisions designers have to make, because picking the right color scheme often makes the difference between a great and a mediocre website design.
Thankfully, designers can rely on many tools to help them pick the right colors for their next project and in this post we’ll tell you about 13 of the best applications you can use to pick the color scheme for your next website. With their help, you’ll definitely find it much easier to pick the right color palette and we are absolutely sure that you’ll simply fall in love with at least several of these tools. Let’s start!
Kuler is a web application that is completely free to use. It is known as one of the best color scheme creation applications and its features have helped thousands of designers lay the perfect foundation of their next website design. Kuler features a user-friendly interface and a wide range of helpful functions that will let you quickly try out different color schemes.
Color Lovers is an online community where designers can share, browse and create unique color schemes. It is a great place to look for inspiration, but keep in mind that the color scheme creation tool isn’t as functional as you’d expect. However, it is still a great place to try some new things and maybe browse the color schemes of other designers.
Color Scheme Designer is another great web application that helps you pick the right colors of your next theme. One of the most interesting features of this tool is the “colorblind simulation” which ensures that Color Scheme Designer can be used by absolutely everyone.
SpyColor.com is a great website to pick a color scheme for your next design. It offers a lot of handful features such as color conversion, a wide range of pre-made color schemes which are arranged in several categories and more.
If you like how a picture looks, then you may want to try to use the color scheme in it. However, selecting the right colors manually can be a tricky task. Thanks to Pictaculous you don’t have to worry about that, because this free service will automatically generate a color scheme for you, based on a picture you upload.
When you first take a look at Color Hunter’s interface, you probably won’t be very impressed. However, despite the simple interface, this tool has much to offer. It can suggest color schemes based on a picture you upload. Apart from this, it can also help you find the right color combination thanks to the smart suggestion system.
If you are looking for the simplest and easy-to-use piece of color picking software, then Color Blender is definitely the right choice for you. With the push of a single button this tool will suggest a color scheme consisting of five colors. The suggested templates can then be directly downloaded and imported in Photoshop or Illustrator.
The simple color picker can be used to manually select a set of colors for your next color scheme. However, ColourGrab offers other interesting features such as automatically suggesting a color scheme based on an uploaded image. This function will generate a unique 3D pie chart that shows which are the most used colors in the image. Overall, ColourGrab isn’t so useful if you want to simply pick a color palette for your website, but it is a great choice if you want to closely examine images.
TinEye is a website that offers more than a plain color scheme creator. It can also be used to find similar images or extract color schemes from images. You can also browse the rich gallery to find images which may have the right colors for your next design. TinEye is definitely an interesting tool and you should give it a try the next time you are creating a color scheme.
ColorExplorer is one of the most advanced applications in terms of color selection. It boasts a wide range of helpful features that many of you will certainly find to be very useful. It can help you create, modify and analyze all kinds of color palettes. The conversion tool is also very useful and accurate, so we can easily nominate ColorExplorer as one of the best long-term choices for web designers.
Colormunki is a great choice if you are looking for something new and interesting. Naturally, it offers a traditional color picker tool, but also interesting features such as the Pantone swatches which can be used to generate attractive combinations of colors.
Colr.org offers a great in-depth analysis tools that allows you to closely examine all the colors used in an image. It can automatically generate a color palette for you or it can let you manually choose the colors used in the image. Colr.org is an interesting alternative of other color picker applications and we strongly advise you to give it a try when you have the opportunity.
‘Colors on the Web’ is an interesting tool that allows you to select a single color using its hexadecimal or RGB value. Based on your choice, the tool will then generate a set of several colors that are visually pleasing and can turn into a great color scheme for your next web design. Keep in mind that this tool is based on Flash, so it doesn’t work through iPad or iPhone.
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Author: Noemi Twigg
Editor of Splashpress Media, writer, and geek bitten by the travel bug. You can follow her on Twitter @noemiruth.