If you lack the color scheme gene and can’t open Photoshop and pick a handful of beautiful colors off the fly, here are some schemes and coordinators from around the web to get things rolling.
PRE-MADE PALETTES
Behr.com - Play around with colors and palettes here. A similar technique I’ve seen Kevin use is to take a bunch of the paint samples and painting guides from Home Depot.
Popular Website Schemes - James Archer created a list of Color schemes based on popular web sites.
ColorSchemer - Some nice schemes to be found here.
Adam Poselli’s Color Schemes - A few color schemes along with the pictures used to create them.
COLOURlovers.com - Consistently updated color trends and pallets.
colr.org - Create schemes from either colors or images of your choice.
ColorBlender - Very nice tool to generate and play around with palettes.
DO IT YOURSELF
Wellstyled.com - Probably my favorite of the bunch.
Color Schemer Online v2 - Easy to use. Just enter RGB or HEX value and generate a scheme.
The Man In Blue - Enter a HEX value and see how the scheme looks on a test page.
The Color Coordinator - A little confusing at first. Decide for yourself it it helps out.
Another nice color resource to add to the list: Colorblender.com
This is a very good list of helpful color links. I especialy like the idea of colorlovers.com for some reason. Very cool
Another resource that I’ve found particularly helpful is http://www.december.com/html/, especially the http://www.december.com/html/spec/colorshades.html section. Very helpful if you’d like to find a lighter/darker version of a color in your scheme.
Thanks for another great list.
Our very own Stephen Hallgren developed the colourmod tool located at http://www.colourmod.com/. It is also an Apple widget. Pretty sweet stuff.
The widget is located here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/developer/colourmod.html
This is a very good list. Thanks! For premade schemes I’d normally look at SimpleGraphix or the list at About.com. There also used to be a website where you could upload a photo and it would analyse the colours in the photo and pull out a colour scheme from it. Now I can’t remember where it is!
If you lack the color scheme gene and can’t open Photoshop and pick a handful of beautiful colors off the fly,
Yup that’s me right there. I always seem to have a problem picking the right colour scheme. I have been to a few of the sites you listed and have a couple of them bookmarked as well. Thanks.
Here’s a beauty
http://jrm.cc/play/color-palette-generator
Chris, I’ve posted a couple of times on my site about color schemes and color scheme creators - thought it might be helpful to include those links here: Ideas for Color Schemes; Color Pickers and Color Scheme Pickers.
Ack! Where did my links go?! Okay, let’s try again:
Ideas for Color Schemes: http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000104.html
Color Pickers and Color Scheme Pickers: http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000016.html
Here’s another color scheme resource. http://www.netcocktail.com
It’s a new project, only a few days old, but you are all welcome to visit, participate, submit your sites and your ideas.
Another personal favorit is ColorWhore - a directory of nice colors.
Visit http://www.colorwhore.com/ and see for yourself.
I’ve actually seen colorwhore before but always ended up with a hideous palette. Hopefully you’re having more luck than me.
This Flash-based tool is worth a mention as well: http://www.telecable.es/personales/alberto9/color/index.htm
This bit got chopped off: There’s a manual here - which is pretty much essential reading: http://www.telecable.es/personales/alberto9/color/tutorialeng.htm
Thanks for the link, guys.
In case anyone’s interested, we’re actually looking at spinning off the Return of Design color schemes section into a separate, more robust website. If anyone has any suggestions for functionality they’d like to see, please feel free to drop me a line.
Web Developers might be interested in the list I’ve created, too. The Colors Section of the Essential Bookmarks for Web Developers as well as Web Developer’s Handbook contain a list of useful color tools, color theory resources etc.