25 Color Combination Tools For Designers
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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?
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About the Author
Lee Ka Hoong
Lee specializes in making money online, blogging tips and SEO, visit his blog and learn how to make money online with your blog. You can also follow him on Twitter.
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Mmmh … Interesting ! It’s very similar with http://spyrestudios.com/color-combination-tools/
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! :)
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.
i thought kuler was the only tool for color combination..
have to try the other tools.. thanks.
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.
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.
lol – Don’t feel too bad, I think as designers, nice interfaces make an even bigger impact on us than on anyone else! ;)
These are awesome!
I’ll definitely be using these and bookmarking this post for future use!
Thanks again for the great post, as usual!
No problem Justin, thanks for commenting!
Thank you for this great article. This is very helpful.
Glad to hear you like it zico :)
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
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 :)
I don’t generally use color tools and play it by personal taste. However, some of these look very tempting!
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).
Till today I always worked with Kuler and Pictaculous which I like a lot. But I will try your other suggestions as well! Thanks!
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/culture/branding-insights/2009/11/vast-ocean-of-blue.php/?s=bl
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.
I also use Kuler to decide on the interior color scheme of my living room
Choosing right color that match with your design it’s not funny game.These tools really help us a lot.Thank you.
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.
I’ve always found your blog to be down-to-earth and informative.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that is obsessed with color palettes!
I use the Color Pallette Generator all the time. Some of these others look very cool too. Great collection of tools for designers.
Nice post from the screenshots to its demonstration, I really love it. Keep it up.
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.
Some excellent tools here, I really like colour lovers personally but will look at some of these. M.
Nice post, so far Kuler is my favorite of the bunch. Plug the swatches right into Photoshop and you’re ready to design.
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.. :)
am in love and impressed with what i saw.
u good.
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!!!!
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.
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!
really like it, just to learn it.
Great Post, I’ve never used any colour combination tools before. But this has definitely swayed me to try it! Looks cool.
Thanks.
Loved the tips! What about http://www.colourlovers.com/ ? Have you ever tried it?
It’s a great site Luisa, a lot of fun!
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.
Very nice post like always. Your site is teaching me some great tips about coding and designing. Well done. Keep it up.
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.
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.
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
Thanks for these they are brilliant and so useful
Nice collection!!
This is such a great collection,i just booked mark a a few of them.
Thanks for putting this useful resource
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.
Hello thanks for the tool, yes i downloaded it, thanks
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
The other thing that I liked was that it had been produced specifically as a CMS
Rage about the being beaten by two days :P 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.
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
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.
Great post. Wealth of information and some great handy hints. Thanks for sharing.
Usefull app, thanks! I like very much the kuler http://kuler.adobe.com/#themes/rating?time=30
Fantastic collection! I love the ones that give you a whole color scheme that would look good, as a site’s design is using a variety of colors.
Its really great help for designers like me. thanks a lot.
inite 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
Dear guys, I’ve surfed the net more than three hours today, however, I haven’t found such useful information like yours. Thanks a lot, it’s really useful for me.
Super cool compilation of article on color combination tools for us designers. Thanks.. I’ve got it bookmarked.
Great color collection tools. I usually use Kuler. Thanks for sharing.
This 25 Color Combination Tools makes the color become smoother and cooler. It is a very big help in designing images.
Wow, that’s a lot of great color tools! I see so many color schemes out there these days that just don’t look good at all. It makes you wonder if the designer is seeing the same thing as the readers.
It is the best tool ever. Its very useful when it comes to combine color and it is also big help in creating themes.
I just play with GIMP for sometime just to do copping and resizing since I’m not a designer nor a web programmer. Thx for the list.
Thanks really helped, is not easy to match colors and saved a lot of time.
Cheers for sharing these ideas.Its good to study some post about this these days.
Its meaningful and somehow sharing this to readers like me, would make me wish to surf the internet to have the ability to get a whole lot more marvelous suggestions.
this is just perfect! I am student of graphic design and you just made my day perfect! thanks a lot!!!!
thanks thanks thanks… very good article!
That makes it a very handy site for bloggers! Now load up the site in a new tab, and let’s start our case study!
yes, it is a very handy site… I am using it much!
Awesome site. Thanks, this is very useful.
yes, really… it is awesome! love your style!
yes, it is a very handy site… I am using it much!Awesome site. Thanks, this is very useful.
I have read a couple of with the content articles on your website now, and i really like your style of blogging. I added it to my favorites weblog website checklist and will be checking back again soon. Please check out my website too and let me know what you think.
Whau, a lot of great tools i must admit. This post is definitely worth to bookmark. Thanks for sharing with us.
Thanks a lot for this post… very great tools!
http://www.uctovnici.com These are awesome!
Thanks for the great post! Its so uselful to me as I am an exhibition stand designer.
Great color collection tools. Thanks for sharing..
Thanks a lot for this post… very great tools!
You have a very nice and motivating posting style, it makes me read your articles with great interest.
your color color collection is really fantastic, its really helpful for several like new bie.
It is a wonderful blog for web designers. I learned a lot from your blog. Keep writing. Looking forward to read more.
with a quick overview on each to help you decide which to try.
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Hi! Nice article! I will like to recomend this site!
http://0to255.com/
A great way to find color variarions.
Cheers!
very help full & step by step information
http://www.dataentry-service
is given nice one……..
thanks
Lee, there is one resource missing from your list – http://colorpilgrim.com – it is a great resource for color schemes classified according to mood and industry.
Hi! Nice article! I will like to recomend this site!
This is excellent collection of tools that will really helps to find out best color combination for website.
I also would like to hear your thoughts on file uploads – done right. Thanks for all your great articles.
awesome collection. you guys rock :)
the info here is soo useful and just what I have been lookinf for,
Thank you..
Good day. Very cool website!! Guy .. Excellent .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your site and take the feeds additionally…I’m glad to find numerous helpful info right here within the post. Thank you for sharing…. Cheers, Lackdecken
Nice blog guys! It really learned me a lot of things… :) Thanks!
this is a nice blog to learn the things… I really appreciate those kind of things, especially when they are free!
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I love the colors and all these pictures are incredible beautiful
Thanks for the great post and great website! It is very useful for me as a designer!
wooow, better than any tutorial!
Nice tutorial, thanks for making the things so clear!
very nice and instructive! thanks guys!
best best best design blog ever!
you are great! I really love this blog!
excellent website for designers. thanks for this post specially!
awesome tools to pickup the best color combination..it’s really helpful for designers like me..
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O.M.G! Lee, you are absolutely brilliant! I’m a trainee Web Designer under The Fine Line Art and Design Studio which is owned by my husband, the site will be on the net very soon and I needed a really good colour site. I found others but wasn’t that bothered then yours came up & WOW! I’ve bookmarked it and printed off the pages on nice glossy paper for my files. THANK YOU and I will happily recommend you to others. All the best from Phil in the UK.
Excellent! this is better than any book about design… thanks!
This is an excellent collection of resources. Getting the right colors can make or break any web design.
Here’s a new resource – Colors by Number (for iPad) – it’s both a sophisticated color selection tool for professional designers as well as a unique teaching tool for exploring the nuances of color theory as an experience. The latest upgrade is packed with new features and functionality. Check it out!
I like some of the comments too though I would prefer we all stay on the suject in order add value to the subject!