25 Awesome Tools for Choosing a Website Color Scheme
As a designer, color management should be an integral part of your workflow. A website’s color scheme helps shape its identity and therefore should not be carelessly thrown together. Here are 25 online, desktop and iPhone applications to help you live and breathe color management no matter where you are.
Online Tools
There are simply a ton of free color tools available on the web. However, a cursory search reveals that most are extremely basic and simply mimic everything else out there. Here’s a few that I found that stood out in either design, usability or features.
Kuler
Kuler is one of the best free online color scheme creation tools out there and my personal favorite. You can browse tons of pre-made color schemes or create your own using an advanced yet simple to use interface. My favorite feature of Kuler is that access is built right into Adobe Illustrator so it’s never far away. There’s also an AIR app and Dashboard widget available for even more access options.
Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer has a beautiful interface that helps you create beautiful color schemes in seconds. colorblind simulation is built in so you can ensure usability will be optimized for all users.
Colour Lovers
An online community where color aficionados can create, share and browse color schemes.
Pictaculous
The guys at MailChimp created this excellent free service. Simply upload a picture and automatically get a color scheme to go with it. Suggestions from Kuler and Colour Lovers are built in and you can download the Adobe swatch file.
Color Spire
A simpler, no frills interface that helps you build a five swatch color scheme. Provides a nifty preview of the selected colors working together on a basic site frame.
Daily Color Scheme
Every day brings a new featured color scheme. Choose from a variety of download formats and browse past color schemes.
Instant Color Schemes
Though the interface is a bit lacking this tool is actually pretty helpful. Just type in a word or phrase (Ex: Firetruck) and you’ll get 24 of the most prominent colors that result from the first five images in a matching Yahoo image search.
Color Explorer
Color Explorer is the most fully featured online solution I came across in my research. The impressive feature list includes a number of advanced tools for creating and converting your own color palettes as well as the ability to browse popular schemes. If you fancy yourself a color expert, this one is for you.
Color Rotate
Color Rotate is a lot like a 3D version of Kuler. The interface is not exactly intuitive, but it sure is pretty and fun to play with!
Toucan
Toucan has all the quality and richness you’d expect from an Aviary application. Use the interactive color wheel to create schemes on the fly and take advantage of the color theory features built into the application. Like Color Scheme Designer, Toucan comes with a colorblindness simulator supporting all major types of colorblindness.
Colour Grab
Type in the URL of a image, get the most frequently appearing colors and a nice 3D pie chart so you can see how often a color appears. Downloadable Adobe swatches built in.
Color Jack
A simple interactive color wheel with several customization options and color theory formulas.
Desktop Applications & Widgets
Web apps are great, but sometimes you need a local solution that doesn’t require you to navigate to a website and is easier to merge with your current workflow.
Tangerine (Mac)
Tangerine provides a color palette that remains consistent across a wide array of graphics applications making it easy to use the same colors throughout your design process as you switch apps.
Price: $39.95
Color Schemer (Mac or PC)
Color Schemer is a fully featured color palette creation application. Get all the features of some of the most popular web apps and more with the convenience of an always present desktop application. By far the best desktop solution I found.
Price: $49.99
ColorBurn (Mac or PC)
ColorBurn gives you access to tons of beautiful color schemes right in your OS Dashboard (or Yahoo Widget interface). ColorBurn features daily palettes of four colors and the ability to browse the previous week’s schemes.
Price: Free
Swatch (Mac)
As an avid Mac user, I love men bar apps. Swatch is an extremely helpful little app that puts color swatch management and creation right in your menu bar and therefore easily accessible from any application.
ColourMod (Mac or PC)
ColourMod is a stylishly designed widget that provides a quick and easy way to grab any color’s Hex value.
Price: Free
iPhone Apps
The iPhone provides a great way to bring color management and scheme creation with you everywhere you go. Another bonus is the multi-touch interface, which adds an element of direct interaction that you don’t get with a mouse. Here’s a list of great iPhone apps I found along with the descriptions from their creators.
Color Expert
“Color Expert is an interactive color wheel and swatch library that helps artists and designers identify, translate, capture and showcase color.”
Price: $9.99
CliqCliq Colors
“Colors is an easy-to-use color picker for discovering, converting and managing colors and palettes.” If you’ve ever been a print designer, you’re probably fond of color books full of Pantone swatches that fan out into a rainbow of easily browsable colors. MyPantone offers this functionality in the convenience of an iPhone app. “A beautiful color tool for the iPhone, Color Stream lets you create and store color palettes that are either created from scratch, generated from a photo, or even auto-generated using our built-in color schemer (which supports analogous, monochromatic, triadic and more!).” “Simple and thoughtfully designed, Loupe lets you create color swatches from your photo library or using the camera to save colors as you find them.” “Think Ink is a free iPhone application that lets you explore color combinations from the Dewey Color System, create custom color palettes, and order coordinating paper samples from Neenah Paper.” “Vibrant is a full featured color picker/color chooser and gives you all the tools that a designer needs to identify and manage colors and color themes on the go. Take a photo of the target with the integrated camera, pinch and drag the cross-hair to select a color, spin the color wheel and slide the sliders to adjust your color and tap the star to save your new color in the palette.” You should now be equipped to create fantastic color schemes for everything you design. We examined a variety of web apps, desktop apps and iPhone apps to get the job done in plethora of different ways. Let us know if you liked any of these applications and what comprises your personal color workflow! 
Price: $2.99My Pantone
Price: $9.99Color Stream
Price: $2.99Loupe
Price: $0.99Think Ink: Color Unleashed
Price: FreeVibrant Color Picker
Price: $0.99Conclusion
Not enough. We need 50. No. 100! Maybe more.
Cool, I especially like the ones where you upload an image and get a palette back. Any more of these ?
very useful
thank you
No http://colorsuckr.com ??
Great list! I’m always looking for colors for my website and at the same time, keep it simple with plenty of white space. I wish I’ve known of these tools in the past though.
Great list. I haven’t seen these before. Trying to create a color scheme for my personal website.
Thanks for the list.
The last update at Daily Color Scheme was on September 20, 2006 … it’s a pitty!
Great reference for the designers, definately will get my team to use them :)
These are awesome, I’m always looking for new colour-ways so these are definitely going to come in handy. I already knew about Kular and Colourlovers but there are some really handy web design resources there.
Ryan
good article i will use this info for sure
thanks these are great
Great collection, thanks for sharing.
No excuses now for not having a great color scheme ;)
Normally I use ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’ but some schemes can be helpfull
Great collection! Add Big Huge Labs — http://bighugelabs.com/colors.php — nice color scheme generator using your uploaded photo or URL, which will even generate sample CSS for you.
AWESOME post, guys!! I LOVE this!! I still think that ColourLovers should be listed at the top :) If you follow me @pixel8design on twitter, I tweet a lot showing my tweet deck color scheme.. most I pulled from ColourLovers! :) Oh and on colourlovers… I’m “nanochromaddict” hook up with me there, and don’t forget to say hi to “logochic”… she has some amazzzzzing schemes up there, too!
Thanks for a great post. I’m a n00b when it comes to the design world, but when it comes to color… that’s something I tend to ADORE. Thanks for all the desktop and iPhone links, too!
ColourLovers is STILL the best!
Nice collection, thanks for sharing.
Nice:-) I was looking for something like that only! Would also love to have one which also takes care of WCAG 2.0 color specifications? Color blindness support is there looking for contrast…
ColorImpact is missing! It is better than all this tools put together. http://www.tigercolor.com/
a great tool to work on.
great blog version i can work on
Great reference. thanks! Ignore that guy ROB at the top. How ungrateful! :) All you really need is ONE good one.
hello,
thanks for ur valuable information.but some schemes can be helpfull
Thanks for the great information. I hope to be back soon. I have book marked it keep posting. Thanks again.
Thanks for the information kuler is a great tool.
nice work done Kuler
Iphone app is really a great app.
colors are superbly done .
nice work done.
all apps are superb.
I wish PC color picker and the software giving the best color combination. Is there ?
Excellent list, I like using kuler and colour lovers.
Excellent list. Color Spire is definitively my favourite, but what I like about this list is that resumes all of them in one list.
Thanks!!!!
Great list of resources, will have to check some of these tools out. Thanks for sharing!
This is a page I will bookmark. Great list! Thanks for putting this together and sharing it with us!
i think its just great.
nice tools to work on.
Nice work done.
Great list. They are all awesome apps that help alot. Thanks!
great list i hope to get them more.
nice list work done.
Wow. So much good stuff and no price to pay. That is amazing to me
Picture in -> palette out. How sweet is that?
nice work done.
Comprehensive article – well done.
Some may find colorswatch for the iphone interesting and useful.
lots of amazing colours there, good article too.
I carry on listening to the news bulletin talk about getting free online grant applications so I have been looking around for the top site to get one. Could you advise me please, where could i find some?
Great list. Thought I’d add http://www.ColorCombos.com. You can bookmark your color scheme, and you have a little more control over the template example.
very nice
thankyou very much
Nice list, very halpful thanks!
wonderful list, i like it
These are very helful tools to work on
Wow, had no idea there were so many out there – thanks for this!
Awesome collection, I’m always looking for new ways to access colour so these are definitely going to be useful. I already knew about Kular & Colourlovers but there are some excellent other design resources here.
great this is really informative.
Excellent list. Colour Spire is definitively my favourite. I like your colours on this site too btw
Love the list. It will take me a month to go through them all. Which is your personal favorite? I have always used Color Schemer, but there seems to be a lot more out there.
Thanks for putting this together!
We need a travel insurance apps too. Go to usure.hk
強積金 MPF apps look inside
The best color resource on the web right now is http://colorpilgrim.com It has colors filed into mood, trend & industry which works really well for me.
Nice list of tools – I’m pretty old school, and use the spinning paper cardboard color wheel, but I can see where these tools would be efficient – going to give a couple a try I think.
http://colorpilgrim.com is missing from this list!
Thank you for sharing, as a new designer I am trying to learn as much as I can. I have a lon way to go, thank you.
Not just the collection is great, the order is also perfect. Important ones, like Kuler at the top. This post was quite helpful for me. Thanks.
very useful tools thanks for sharing this great compilation.
Such a cool article. Really found this useful!!
updates please – Ill bookmark you.
..awesome!!
thanks for sharing.
Did u check http://uicart.com ? it provides ability to search with color patterns and related colors. Showcase the User interfaces
This is awesome collection of tools. This was more then helpful.
cool tools, it helps me a lot.
Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that:
Are they arranged in any particular order? If so, Color Spire really should be higher on the list. It’s by far my favorite.
Do any of these tools do a w3c colour check for brightness and contrast? That would make it so much easier to design a universally accessible website.
Awesome list of tools. This is a must to have list to any web developer’s arsenal. Thanks for providing this.
the 2nd tool of this list was really a great one! thank you for the share :)
I use Kuler on a daily basis.. couldnt live without it
Good.. i would definetley use some of the tools while re designing my website look…. i want a combination of red & blue….
We’re a gaggle of volunteers and starting a new scheme in our community. Your web site offered us with helpful information to work on. You have done a formidable process and our entire community can be thankful to you.
Really useful article. Bookmarked for future reference! :)
The “Think Ink” app in particular is quite useful thanks.