ejcross.com

One of the biggest challenges I face is to determine what colors look good on a site that I design. I’m sure that I’m not alone in this aspect as color palette selection for your site is a real challenge in the design world. So, unless you are educated in the design sector of web design, I would like to offer 5 great sites that I use to help me design sites that are visually appealing with their colors.

COLOURlovers.com

The COLOURlovers.com site is a really neat site that allows for registered users (free registration) to submit color palettes that they have designed. The great part of this is that your color palettes are already selected, and you can view them on one page, side by side, or as individual color tiles.

The color palettes that are given also give the RGD and Hex codes for the color, which make it easier to incorporate them into your site design. There is also a “trendiest colors of the month” section where you can see what color combos are “hot” for the month. You can also grade and submit comments on each color palette that is submitted by other users.

Colorsontheweb.com Wizard

One of my favorite color sites is the Color Wizard from colorsontheweb.com. This is a great tool that allows you to input a hex code for the color you are interested in and it will then show you a lot of information about hue, saturation, tint and color variations.

If you don’t like the colors, just slide the RGB bars around a little, and it automatically adjusts the variations of the colors you have.

The colorsontheweb.com site also includes a color wheel and contrast analyzer. The contrast analyzer will ensure that you have enough contrast between your color selections in order for you site to be more accessible and usable for people with color difficulties, or for the average joe so that you won’t put a light gray on a white background.

colorscheme generator 2

The Well Styled Color Scheme Generator 2 is a quick and easy color generator that is a great tool to check your accessibility and usability with.

This generator gives you a lot of flexibility with the color schemes you can select. However, one big bonus is that if you are testing for visual usability, there is a drop down menu that will change the colors in order for you to see what people with vision problems will see.

The drop down menu gives you eight (8) selections from protranopy to full color blindness as options. This can really make a difference with your site as it can show you what others will see and help you to avoid color selections that might cause parts of your site to disappear.

colorcombos.com

The color combos site is similar to the colourlovers.com site as it already has color palettes put together for you to review. One big difference is it’s combo tester that shows a larger selection of the colors that you want in order to make it easier to see them side by side.

There is also a color library, color tags that let you select a base color, and a unique feature that lets you grab the colors from another website. If you like the colors used on a particular site, you can enter the URL, and it will present the colors used to you.

Color Picker 3.1

The last good color selection tool is called Color Picker 3.1 from pagetutor.com.

This tool is designed to give you a live look at how your colors fit together by allowing you to modify the background and text colors. It will also let you set your hover, active and link colors too.

In conclusion

Picking the right color for your site is more than making it look good to you or your visitors. There are usability and accessibility considerations that should be given some thought as well. I hope that you find these tools a good resource to help you understand color better, and that they provide some benefit to you and your site users.

Share this article:

Thanks for stopping by and visiting ejcross.com! Did you like what you found? You can subscribe to my RSS feed or use the Trackback URL. Thanks!