Essentee Blog
Web design and management articles, guides and even the occasional rant.
Free online tools for creating beautiful colour pallets
There are some great online tools that you can use to generate beautiful colour palettes when you need some inspiration and don't trust your own instincts.
Kuler
Nice and easy to browse through new and popular themes. You can search by topic, say "landscape" and get a colour scheme to suite.
Some themes are better than others – I like the ones that have a core colour plus a contrasting one to use for highlights. Others are just a selection of tones from a set colour .
Click on a small slider icon to see the full RGB, CMYK and Hex formula for each. You can download the swatch which will work with any of Adobe's creative suit applications
Color Scheme Designer
Another easy to use one with a colour 'wheel'. You can select from mono or complmentary schemes amoungst others and click on a tab to get the colour list but only gives you the hex codes.
Colour Scheme Designer Website
Colorsontheweb.com is similar to others listed here, with this one you can select a base colour and the wizard will display colours in a variety of huse, saturation and tints with the hex code for each.
Colour Lovers - a community system
A community site where you can browse community created palettes for a whole range of projects (not just websites). Also has patterns and shapes. The site aslo has craft related content - all based around things that are (or can be) colourfull!
And you can buy the t-shirt if you really want....
Pictaculous - fun and cool name too!
Upload an image and this site will generate a palette based on the image, and uses Kuler to suggest some themes. There's an iphone app and you can download the swatch.
Fun just to play around with too!
Colourgrab.com is similar in that it lets you enter the url for an image online and get a colour scheme from there. Again, good for inspiration but the scheme is a random and rather large set of colours if you use an image has a lot going on!
Colr.org also creates a scheme from an image (upload your own or get random one from Flickr). You can select a colour from those 'mapped' onto the image and find it's hex code. Unfortunately when we tested it the button to go and find matching istock photos wasn't working. But a nice tool if you want to find specific colours from an image
Color Hunter
This also creates palettes from images and displays with hex number. Not as flexible in the sense that you can't adjust on the fly, but nice and simple. Can upload your own image or enter the url of an image from Flickr.
