Choosing a Websites Color Scheme

Ever since I can remember color has fascinated me! In fact for me, narrowing down the color choices is one of the biggest challenges I face when designing a site.. there's just too many beautiful colors to choose from :)

I realized today that a huge portion of my bookmarks are filled with places to inspire new color schemes and other handy (mostly online and all totally free), color pickers. Here are a few of my top favorites.

Color Combos
Need inspiration for a new color scheme? This is one of the places I go for ideas. There's quite a few pre-made pallettes, a combo tester so you can see how colors look together, and a handy online tool to let you grab the color combinations from an existing site to play around with.

Color Palette Generator
If you have an image that has the colors you want, this online tool can create a color palette based on any image! There are also quite a few images there already if you just want to browse for inspiration.

Color Lovers
Another place designed to inspire designers. There's a ton of beautiful palettes (at the time of this review there are 26, 258 color combinations!) and there is also a search to help you narrow down the themes to your taste.

Color Schemes Generator
A handy, fast and easy to use generator that can either give you Web safe colors or let you go the full range of hues. Play around with this for a bit, it's a lot more powerful than it seems at first glance.

Color Converter
OK, here's the deal with this one, say you have the RBG code for a color (a lot of graphics programs use only this), but need to know how to write it for use on your website (i.e. hexidecimal), just type it in here and it'll translate it for you. Fast and easy!

ColorCop - Free Color Picker
This is one I highly recommend! Use the eye dropper to sample any color you see on your screen and get the hex and RGB codes for it. Lots of powerful features in this tiny freeware program.

Spot Color
For Mac users this little free app lets you use the OSX color picker as a stand-alone app, including with any plug-ins you may have added to it. If you're using this for web coding, I'd recommend Hex Color Picker with it to be able to get the exact hex code for any colors you might want to use in your websites.

Basic Color Theory Primer
If you're not really sure what the difference between hue, tone, shade or other terminology, this is a great place for a basic tutorial. It also gives a basic insight to the effects and moods of color. It's just one short page but it does pack in quite a bit of info.