Three Cool Tools to Choose Your Website Colors

As you know, the colors you use on your website play a big role in the overall impression that your visitors get of whatever it is you are trying to sell to them.

I am a big believer that color schemes must be well thought out. I personally have some favorites, but sometimes I get tired of designing the same old sites or my own favorite colors don’t match a product.

I have used three tools that I highly recommend for choosing a color scheme that I wanted to share with you. I have seen others, but these are my favorites. All of them are FREE!

Am I missing one? If so, share your favorites here!

Color Scheme Designer

Very easy to use color theme creator. There are six palette settings: monochromatic, complimentary, triad, tetrad, analogic, and accented analogic color that you can choose depending on what type of site you are designing. The best feature and why it is my number one pick, is the ability to preview the scheme on a dummy web page. You can also export your color palette as a Photoshop palette, HTML+CSS, TEXT, XML, and GPL .

Colorotate

One great feature of Colorotate is the ability to browse through various user templates. They are a great source of inspiration.

I don’t find it as easy to use as the Color Scheme Designer, but it is still a good resource. Another great feature and one that makes it totally worthwhile is using the 3D interface to see the multidimensional nature of the colors. You can also upload images and use those colors if you already have a logo or design in place.

Kuler by Adobe

Least favorite of the three. You can extract color schemes from images which is good, but I personally don’t like the interface. Like Colorotate, you can look through previous users themes and get some inspiration, which is a great feature.