Five free tools to choose perfect colors for your website.

Rainbow colors

Color coordination plays a big role in the look and feel of a website. An appealing color scheme is an important prerequisite for eye-catching web design. Dull or very sharp colors or mismatch colors will not only look ugly it may overshadow other nice elements of your website. Choosing vibrant, harmonious colors that are pleasant to eyes enhance the aesthetic appeal of a website. Following is a list of online resources you can use to construct the color schemes for your next web design project.

 

Kuler

Kuler screenshot

 

Kuler is a feature-rich online color free tool from Adobe that you can use to create your color themes or browse through thousands of themes generated by community members. As a registered user, you can save your themes and then view them in MyKuler. You can create themes using a single color or by using a color wheel. You can also extract color scheme from your images, for that you can upload your images or import them from Flickr. Kuler is my favorite.

 

ColorRotate:

ColorRotate

 

Like Adobe Kuler, Colorrotate is also a free, online tool to generate color templates, but this is a 3D tool. Its intuitive 3D interface is fun to use and it enables you to quickly see the multidimensional nature of your colors and the relationships between colors. You can use its drag-and-drop option to adjust hue, brightness, and saturation. You can load color themes from your images. It also has a vast collection of community generated themes that you can browse to get some inspiration.

 

ColorSchemeDesinger

ColorSchemeDesinger

 

ColorSchemeDesigner is another free, online tool to generate color palettes. Its unique, easy-to-use color theme creator packs many useful features. You can generate single monochromatic, complementary, triad, tetrad, analogic, and accented analogic color palettes. Not only you can create the color palette, you can also use their preview function to apply your palette to a dummy web page, to see how your colors will look on your website. This will definitely save many designers lot of time.
Another great feature is the ability to export your color palette as a Photoshop palette, HTML+CSS, XML, TXT, and GPL.
This tool does not work in IE6.

 

ColourLovers

ColorLovers

 

If you need color inspiration, you will love ColourLovers. Designers from all over the world share their creative ideas on this website. It has over 286,866 members and showcase more than 2,407,124 colors, 1,090,882 palettes and 732,299 patterns. You can create your own color palettes or just pick one from this enormous collection.

COLOURlovers is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color – whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification – a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

 

4096 Color Wheel

Color Wheel

 

If you don’t want all the bells and whistles of above-mentioned tools, you may want to try Color Wheel. This is a simple web-based tool to view and choose web-safe colors. It offers you a palette of seven colors, displayed on the left side of the screen. You can change these 7 colors one by one by clicking on a color wheel. It is a nice little tool to generate a color palette.

What are your favorite tools for creating color schemes?