8 bits of Colour Inspirations
by Vivien
This is Part Two of my Visual Design Essentials series where I’ll provide you with 8 valuable colour resources on the Web.
- Palette Grabber
This is a very useful Firefox Add-on. It installs a Palette Grabber icon in Firefox status bar. Once you click on this icon it grabs the colours from the website in your browser window and you can export the site’s colour palette to Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, or Flash - Color Palette Generator
This is an indispensable resource if you want to come up with a website colour palette that matches a key image that you want to use on that site. All you need to do is enter the URL of that image and it will generate a colour palette that matches the image - on fly. As an extra bonus you get two palettes - “dull” and “vibrant”, 5 colours each, in hexadecimal colour codes. - Color Schemer Gallery
This website alone contains several practical resources:- Scheme Gallery - full of beautiful colour schemes (unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to browse the gallery by Categories);
- Colour Forums where you can participate in interesting colour-related discussions and learn from experts;
- Colour Schemer Blog
- If you’re a Mac user, then you can install a great Widget for your Mac’s Dashboard: ColourSchemer Galleria. I’ve installed it on my Mac - and absolutely love it.
- ColorBlender.com
This online tool allows you to choose a colour using an online colour picker (in RGB format) and it automatically generated 5 colours that blend well together. The generated palette can be downloaded to Photoshop or Illustrator. - Colors on the Web
This is another website with helpful colour and inspirational colour resources (note that it’s a new site so some pages are still work in progress):- Colour Schemes that you can browse by Categories (Corporate, Elegant, Fun, Kid, Monochromatic, Modern, Retro)
- Colour Info, Colour Meaning, Colour Tools, Colour Forum
- Color Blender
Here you can pick two colours of your choice, specify the number of midpoints you’d like to see. The palette will generate a palette that contains the colors you input as well as the requested number of midpoint colors, and the hexadecimal values of those colors. - COLOUR lovers
I’ve already talked about this site in my How to Get Inspired post, but it’s a must see site that had to be included in this list - Daily Colour Scheme
This site sports a shiny new web 2.0 look, and is still beta. So far it’s collected 14 colour themes, but they are worth checking
Hope you find these colour resources helpful and inspirational. If you know about other great colour-related websites, please share them here.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 8:54 am and is filed under design, inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 10th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Awesome Article :)!
February 11th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Thanks for sharing. I found Color Toy 2.0 http://www.defencemechanism.com/color/
and Adobe Kuler very helpful. Specially the random scheme generation in Color Toy.
February 11th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
thanks, Shankar
Thanks for your two bits, Azarai
Once I get 6 more helpful colour resources, I’ll post them in another article.
February 13th, 2007 at 12:57 am
Yes, your post actually quite a similar (specially the tools/resources stuff) although i focus a bit more on the purpose of color on web design.
Anyway, thanks for sharing.
February 18th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Best post I read so far.. bookmarked!
February 21st, 2007 at 12:37 am
Take a look at Adobe’s Color tool: http://kuler.adobe.com/. I just found it the other day and have been very impressed with it so far.
February 21st, 2007 at 1:01 am
Yes, thank you. I did check it out when Azarai mentioned about it, and the link to Kuler is on my personal toolbar now - just a click away. Great tool.
May 1st, 2007 at 2:36 pm
I’ve got to spend longer over here, ibit. I’ve only just found this article and I’m sure it will help me no end in finding an eye-pleasing combination of colours.Thanks for this.
May 1st, 2007 at 2:59 pm
oh, you’re very welcome, Rory.
I hope you did subscribe to my RSS so you won’t miss out on future inspiration bits
July 19th, 2007 at 5:29 am
A great resource - I would have mentioned NetCocktail too - useful for inspirations for colour schemes! (http://www.netcocktail.com)
July 20th, 2007 at 7:46 am
Oh, I didn’t know about netcocktail - thank you, Peacock, Carter & Associates
July 27th, 2007 at 6:37 am
No problem - it’s a great resource, well worth sharing!
May 25th, 2008 at 6:37 am
there is a new site that allows you to upload any image and extract a color from the image. It matches your selected color to a paint color and creates a palette for you. Super slick. The site is by Sherwin so the colors show are their colors. check it out: http://www.colorofinspiration.com