We all have our different practices that we use for starting a design of any kind. Sometimes we start with paper and pen or sometimes we may even jump right into Photoshop or Illustrator and begin tossing around ideas. One step we can’t skip though is choosing the right color scheme for our design. It is always important to ensure that we understand the color we use in our design. Whether our design be a web site design or print work the color combination we choose is one of the most important choices. In order to ensure that we have a combination that will work well there is always some research that may be done. Especially when it comes to designing a logo or doing branding for a company.

There are several web sites available for designers from Oklahoma to Japan to find color schemes that will match their client’s or own design ideas. There is even color software available for web designers to use for pulling color from images.

List of great web applications for color scheming

Kuler

Adobe’s Kuler is one of my favorite systems for choosing a color scheme there are several premade color schemes for those that are just looking for any color scheme. There is a full tool set however for those that know the colors they want to use and need to find the right RGB combination.

Colourlovers

This is another great resource for finding the right color scheme. They have a huge collection of articles and color information for doing research into different topics. They also have all different types of articles about color and the color wheel that can help you grow as a designer.

myPantone

I’m sure we’ve all heard of Pantone, and if you haven’t then you should probably wiki it. Pantone has developed myPANTONE which is an online community for designers. They have worked with Coffeecup Software to develop a really cool piece of (free) software called myPANTONE Palletes which allows you to do just that. You can develop different palletes with their generation software. The software is available for Mac and PC, so don’t worry about compatibility. One of the best features of this software is the ability to load an image and it will automatically generate a pallete based on that image. You can choose any number of colors to pull or even select several colors from the image yourself to generate a pallete. A very cool piece of software to use locally on your computer. You have to register for a myPANTONE account to download the software though.

Color Schemer Online

This is another quick and easy utility for choosing a color pallete. They have an easy-to-use interface for finding complimentary colors and their RGB/HEX values. They also have a downloadable utility for using on Windows or a Mac.

Color scheme tools can make you a more formidable designer

With this collection of awesome color utilities and generators you should be much more powerful and motivated as a designer to get started with creating an amazing design. What I like to do is bring that image with my color scheme in it into Photoshop and simply sample the colors and begin designing a web site. It is up to you of course when you choose to add picking a color scheme into your design process but it has to be one of the first decisions you make. What other ways have you found to generate a color scheme? Do you you use a different application for color generation?

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