Color is difficult to get right. There’s a near infinite number of combinations out there, but only a few that will actually look right for your project. Because it’s so important to a design’s success, it’s worth taking a little time to work out your palette.
There are a lot of online tools to help out with this. They all vary slightly to suit designers with different preferences on how they work. We’ve collected together 25 of the best here, with a quick overview on each to help you decide which to try.
Website Color Match
Color Match is a website tool that shows you how to do color matching and also giving guidance in choosing the best color. It also displays the HTML code for the color, which saves you time in your design work.
Toucan Color Palettes
There are various tools available from Toucan Color Palettes, such as an image editor, color editor, audio editor, effect editor, vector editor and image markup. Toucan Color Palettes helps you to inject color into your design.
The Color Wizard
Color Wizard is a very cool tool, you submit your own base color and it automatically returns matching colors for the one you selected.
The Color Tool
Color Tool is dedicated to the display of color combinations, changing CSS styles, and displaying many powerful and unique color and font tools. It lets you view and experiment with thousands of color combinations.
Slayeroffice Color Palette Creator
SlayerOffice Color Palette Creator shows 10 shades of the base color (located in the top-left), very useful for monotone designs.
Pro Color Palette Software from Colourlovers
Pro Color Palette includes a photo tool to extract colors from an image, an advanced color picker and color theory wheel to give you your inspiration, and it lets you save the colors you’ve been working with.
Pictaculous
Pictaculous is easy to use; just click a button and upload your image. It then automatically builds a palette for you based on that image.
Palette Man
Palette Man’s uniqueness is in its limitations. It will only allow you to choose a color from the limited set of web-safe colors. It will then help you work out combinations using others from that palette.
Kuler
Adobe Kuler is a free web app for themes that can inspire your design. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of them.
Kolur
Kolur is a simple tool for you to browse color palettes. Designs displayed in the gallery go beyond the generic 3 colored dots, and attempt to portray the possibilities in palettes (As you can see from the image above!).
Instant Color Schemes
Instant Color schemes uses an interesting method of generating the corresponding colors for you; no color theory at all. Instead, it grabs related images from the web and picks the color suggestions out of those.
Infobound Color Schemer
Infobound Color Schemer is a simple tool to help you experiment with various color schemes for your next web or print project. Anyone who uses Photoshop often will know color picker this interface very well!
Hex Color Scheme Generator
Let’s say you want to use red in your design but you don’t know what will work with it, just pick the red color and Hex Color Scheme Generator automatically comes out with 3 matching colors for you.
CSSDrive’s Image To Colors Palette Generator
CSSDrive is another tool for grabbing colors from images. They also run one of the biggest CSS galleries around, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t upload an image from that gallery to see the original palette and how it was used.
Color Wheel from Colors On The Web
The Color Wheel randomizes 6 million colors, simply spin it and it comes out with three matching color ideas for your design. This is for when you’re really stuck for ideas!
Color Wheel Color Calculator
Color Wheel Color Calculator helps designers select HTML, RGB, or CMYK colors and identifies color harmonies and schemes.
ColorToy 2.0
ColorToy 2.0 is a flash based color scheme generator and picker. It generates complementary color schemes based on your inputted color values, or randomly (which is much more fun!).
Color Schemer Online v2
Color Schemer Online v2 has 16 boxes which contain matching color ideas, simply pick a color and it automatically generates matching colors for your art work.
Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer provides color space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme. That’s a lot of great features, with one of the nicest interfaces on this list!
Color Palette Generator from DeGraeve
This color Palette Generator generates a color palette based on an image; upload the image you want and it grabs the color scheme for your art work.
Color Hunter
Color Hunter is a palette gallery where the palette is displayed next to the image it came from. It’s a great way to browse because you can see both the scheme, and a great example of what it can produce!
Color Explorer
ColorExplorer is a free set of tools that include color matching and libraries of color. It’s well developed and has another fantastic interface.
Color Combos
With Color Combos, you can find the perfect color combination for your design. It allows you to select and test the website color combination.
Color Combinations Tester
What I like about Color Combinations Tester is that it fills the screen with your previews. Most of the others give colors in very small boxes.
Daily Color Scheme
Daily Color Scheme is also known as the Every-Day Color Resource, because every day they bring you a fresh color scheme. It’s like daily inspiration from a design gallery, but purely for colors! (NB – This site hasn’t been updated in quite a while now, but we thought the idea and design were cool enough to be worth showcasing anyway!)
Conclusion
That’s our roundup of the top 25. Are there any we’ve missed out on though? What tool do you use to help with your color schemes, or do you just experiment with your design until you get it right?
Custom Search
L'affreux Jojo (1 comments)25 January 10
Mmmh … Interesting ! It’s very similar with http://spyrestudios.com/color-combination-tools/
Michael Martin (1511 comments)25 January 10
Awww they beat us by two days?? Makes me wish I’d scheduled it earlier
Definitely a lot of overlap there, I suppose working out the ones that appeared in both lists would be another nice way of working out what rocks!
Thanks for sharing!
Lee Ka Hoong (13 comments)29 January 10
Too bad to see it happened. Between, this post has been submitted for review in December 2009 if not mistaken and now only got the chance to be published.
As what Michael mentioned above, there must be a lot of overlap out there, but as long as we share valuable information, that’s not a big deal at all.
Anarm (1 comments)25 January 10
i thought kuler was the only tool for color combination..
have to try the other tools.. thanks.
Michael Martin (1511 comments)25 January 10
Kuler is awesome, it’s probably still my favorite for just getting inspiration! But if you do know one of the colors to work with, some of the other tools are really awesome for building a palette around that.
Melvin José (2 comments)26 January 10
Same here.
From all of these Kuler has the nicest interface. That shouldn’t be the main reason for choosing it, but somehow it is for me.
Michael Martin (1511 comments)26 January 10
lol – Don’t feel too bad, I think as designers, nice interfaces make an even bigger impact on us than on anyone else!
Justin Moore-Brown (3 comments)26 January 10
These are awesome!
I’ll definitely be using these and bookmarking this post for future use!
Thanks again for the great post, as usual!
Michael Martin (1511 comments)26 January 10
No problem Justin, thanks for commenting!
zico (9 comments)26 January 10
Thank you for this great article. This is very helpful.
Michael Martin (1511 comments)26 January 10
Glad to hear you like it zico
jay design (12 comments)26 January 10
I’ve used Kuler before but tend just to stick with more mainstream colour schemes with my designs. When I next need some inspiration though, I’ll check a few of these others out. Thanks for posting
Michael Martin (1511 comments)27 January 10
That’s a good point Jay, quite a few of the featured color schemes here are very…. drastic? Not sure that’s the best word, but the idea that while Black-Grey-White with one other color might look great on a web design, it just looks boring in a palette gallery. That would lead to the more risky schemes gaining more popularity in those galleries
Tom Ross (5 comments)27 January 10
I don’t generally use color tools and play it by personal taste. However, some of these look very tempting!
Michael Martin (1511 comments)27 January 10
Nothing wrong with that! I use a mixture of the two. Personal taste if you can, but something I hit a roadblock and some of these tools can be great for giving you a place to start (Always end up adjusting whatever they suggest though).
website laten maken (10 comments)27 January 10
Till today I always worked with Kuler and Pictaculous which I like a lot. But I will try your other suggestions as well! Thanks!
blythe (1 comments)27 January 10
Those tools are great! I had no idea about most of them, but am definitely going to check them out. Awhile back I wrote a blog specifically about the color blue and how pending on what you pair it will it can completely change the look and feel of a website and the message you are trying to convey. Do you agree? Its definitely something to consider as you choose a color palette. Check it out if you are interested
http://www.microarts.com/cultu......php/?s=bl
Tim Nicholson (2 comments)27 January 10
I went ahead and tried out most of these tools, but none are that great for what I’m trying to do. I typically can find a base color I want to start with and these tools seem to do a decent job of showing some similar colors and some very radically different colors based on color theory.
However, I can’t seem to get these color tools to find just the right blue to go with shades of green or just the right yellowish-orange to add more contrast. It seems the tools produce lots of very similar colors along with lots of very radically different colors like in this case shades of purples and grays that I think would look horrible with the green base.
Do I just have some really off-base views of what colors work together or is color theory a bunch of hooey?
BTW, if anyone wants to check out http://xtremelysocial.com and provide suggestions on colors that would be awesome! I’m looking for just the right blue in the header and just the right yellowish or beige-ish for block quotes and site comments to compliment the various shades of green on the site.
myadlan (1 comments)29 January 10
I also use Kuler to decide on the interior color scheme of my living room
henri (1 comments)29 January 10
Choosing right color that match with your design it’s not funny game.These tools really help us a lot.Thank you.
joe (9 comments)29 January 10
Nice collection of resources. I didn’t know there were this many. I usually use colour lovers when I’m out of Ideas for color combos.
IT Lead Generation Services (1 comments)3 February 10
I’ve always found your blog to be down-to-earth and informative.
Toyota Sudden Acceleration Lawyers (1 comments)4 February 10
I’m glad I’m not the only one that is obsessed with color palettes!
Logo Search (10 comments)9 February 10
I use the Color Pallette Generator all the time. Some of these others look very cool too. Great collection of tools for designers.
Man and a Van London (13 comments)11 February 10
Nice post from the screenshots to its demonstration, I really love it. Keep it up.
Ed Harris (1 comments)14 February 10
Good stuff. Actually, I don’t have a clue how to change colors on my site, but the tech guy does and we were just talking about changing up some things. I kind of want a more business-like look, as opposed to artsy-type of things.
Thanks again.
Web graphic design advertising marketing (1 comments)16 February 10
Some excellent tools here, I really like colour lovers personally but will look at some of these. M.
china cheap electronics (3 comments)23 February 10
Wholesale superior quality China Cheap Electronics, China Cell Phone, Laptop Batteries, Ac Adapter, Portable DVD Player, Photo Frame, U-Disk, Earphone Headphone, MP3 & Media Players,Camera & Camcorder, Phone accessories, Laptop Accessories,Laptops & NoteBooks. All products strictly follow the standards of quality guarantee, and are carefully inspected by a responsible QA team before packaging.
MadRukus (7 comments)2 March 10
Nice post, so far Kuler is my favorite of the bunch. Plug the swatches right into Photoshop and you’re ready to design.
Wordpress Blogger (1 comments)5 March 10
Thanks for putting this useful resource .. Im working on a new website and need to find out the best color for my project.. This will certainly help..
adeolayinka wyngz adeniji (1 comments)15 March 10
am in love and impressed with what i saw.
u good.
jeffrey hanner (1 comments)26 March 10
Even though there are a lot of tools to pick from, I like to use Color Scheme Designer. its easy and direct. Will try the others soon on the new site!!!!
Blind Acre Media (3 comments)26 March 10
We have always been keen on Adobe Kuler, a great product! Good to see so many others. We may have to try out a few for comparison.
Damian smith (7 comments)21 April 10
Awesome list! Never realised there were so many of these sites out there.
I shall be browsing through some of them trying to determine my favourite tonight I think.
I have never really used a colour scheme site like these before, I tend to browse through galleries like design shack and take a good look at the colour schemes from there. But sometimes just trying to think up your own with testing (and usually failing) with different combination’s, eventually I stumble across something I really like.
If your a mac user then the ColorSchemerGalleria is really useful widget as well, instant random colour schemes at the click of a button!
Gift Boxes (8 comments)26 April 10
really like it, just to learn it.
northampton Design (1 comments)22 April 10
Great Post, I’ve never used any colour combination tools before. But this has definitely swayed me to try it! Looks cool.
Thanks.
Luisa (2 comments)1 May 10
Loved the tips! What about http://www.colourlovers.com/ ? Have you ever tried it?
Michael Martin (1511 comments)2 May 10
It’s a great site Luisa, a lot of fun!
Bristol Web Design (40 comments)12 May 10
Great collection of colour tools. I’ve only really used Kuler and haven’t heard of most of these. I will have to have a look at them as I always find colour tools very useful when designing my websites. Thanks for sharing.
Link It Directory-Submit URL (2 comments)21 May 10
Very nice post like always. Your site is teaching me some great tips about coding and designing. Well done. Keep it up.
Fireworks (1 comments)24 May 10
Awesome collection of color tools and color design.
This is really an excellent post.
I jsut loved each and every design.
All of the designs are just different.
I’ll definitely use one of them while creating my own website.
Thanks for this great post.
penny auctions (24 comments)2 June 10
Hi,
This is brilliant.
I have an opinion..
How about changing your blog color to crimson red or dark maroon along with chrome silver finishing. Plus the red menus that you mentioned in the other post of yours..
It will be killer blog…real cool.
btw, this scheme is nice and calm.
Joomla Freelancer (3 comments)3 June 10
Dear Michael,
this is again a brilliant collection. I bookmarked more them half of them for my work. Do you know, how much of my time you saved trying out color combinations?
Warm greetings from Germany,
Daniel
Beauchamp Web design (8 comments)14 June 10
Thanks for these they are brilliant and so useful
Mckinley Media Group (21 comments)25 June 10
Nice collection!!
tracteur tondeuse (1 comments)30 June 10
This is such a great collection,i just booked mark a a few of them.
web deisgn (6 comments)12 July 10
Thanks for putting this useful resource
RGB tool (1 comments)26 July 10
Here’s another simple color tool:
http://www.rgbtool.com
It is basically a color picker tool, based on the photoshop default picker. But you can use it to create color palettes and save them for future use. Also, you can download the palettes that you create as .ACT files. I hope you enjoy it.
Steam Multimedia - Web Design Glasgow (9 comments)27 July 10
Some nice tools there, wish i knew about some of these websites about a month ago when i needed them.
I am going to be book marking them today
Curso esmalte (5 comments)28 July 10
The other thing that I liked was that it had been produced specifically as a CMS
John Loudon (6 comments)28 July 10
Rage about the being beaten by two days
thats brutal !
Think Kuler is probably the best tool, though I am quite intresed by the one thats lifting the colour off a photograph, I wonder if a design spoke to a dev about that, can’t speak for others but thats how I used to do it.
i.e. get stunning coloured photographs and swatch the colours in PS.
Paula Dalesio (22 comments)31 July 10
based on the photoshop default picker. But you can use it to create color palettes and save them for future use. Also, you can download the palettes that you create as
reza (8 comments)7 August 10
Rage about the being beaten by two days thats brutal !
Think Kuler is probably the best tool, though I am quite intresed by the one thats lifting the colour off a photograph, I wonder if a design spoke to a dev about that, can’t speak for others but thats how I used to do it.
i.e. get stunning coloured photographs and swatch the colours in PS.
Matt (16 comments)23 August 10
Great post. Wealth of information and some great handy hints. Thanks for sharing.
Memory brindes (7 comments)25 August 10
Usefull app, thanks! I like very much the kuler http://kuler.adobe.com/#themes/rating?time=30