Colour! Colour! Colour!

4096 Color Wheel

Here’s a collection of colour sites from my bookmarks folder.
Some are good all over, others are not so pretty but they are brilliant at their specialist tasks.

The 4096 Color Wheel site above has the advantage that you can download the colour wheel / picker and use it offline.
Jemima Pereira’s app has very clear instructions and simple but subtle controls.
Did I say it was free?

ColorToy

ColorToy 2.0 from DefenceMechanism.com allows you to enter RGB values into their Flash based engine, and it spits out colour schemes for whatever use you have in mind. It will do this randomly too, if you press the appropriate button.

Color Wheel Color Calculator

Color Wheel Color Calculator from Sessions Online Design School is a bit hideous to look at initially, and it’s still hideous 5 minutes later, but by that time you will have found it so useful that you will (partially) have forgiven the tool’s designer for not taking advantage of their own colour tool to design the, er, colour tool.

This is one of the few online tools I’ve met that permits input of CMYK values. Useful.

EasyRGB Calibrated Colours!

EasyRGB (Above and below) allows you to calibrate your monitor before finding colour harmonies or even more fun, searching for a tint.

I put the word “Lime” in the box, chose a colour collection from a dropdown list, and it served up every variation of the colour and every variant of the name. Some powerful juju here.

EasyRGB Search A Tint feature

Even better is the ability to find a complement and colourways to your RGB values and then match them against internationally recognised paint systems. Invaluable for architectural colour schemes and set building.

EasyRGB Find A Complement feature

EasyRGB are pretty serious about colour. They even offer a chromameter for US$880 so that you can measure colours in the real world.
There’s a feature limited, but somewhat free, download of a (Windows only) program that performs all the major functions of the EasyRGB site.

Chromoweb

I took an immediate liking to Chromoweb.
A statement on the front page reads: “A little tip : Bookmark chromoweb so that while you’re designing your site you’ll have on-line help … Afterwards just delete it, there are so many other more exciting things on the net.”
This good hearted Gallic good humour extends across the whole site. There’s even a breakdown of all the colours used by Matisse in his series called “Jazz”. And the colour tools are good, too.

ChromoFlash
OK, so it’s in French, but it couldn’t be simpler to follow:- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and your done!
So play with the Chromoflash web page simulator, it’s fun to use it for rapidly whipping up a page’s colour scheme, and it even emails you your chosen colours when you’ve finished.
Cool beans.

Hue/Saturation Mmmm, Nice!

The next site is irresistible if only for its name: ColorWhore. a directory of nice colors.

Color Whore, generating muted colours.

I’ve never been able to understand the interface in any repeatable way.
I got the above result while looking for Muted colours. Then I looked below the scroll and found this! (Click the thumbnail, it gets better!)

That’s a LOT of colours!

There’s even a site (Red Alt) that will tell you the colours in use on the site you just came from.

Referring Site Colours Analysis
Which can be useful if you’re working on a clients’ website and the colour notes are not to hand.

So, it’s the best till last, and to quote the designer behind this last site: “Color synthAxis is a free online tool designed to simplify the nightmare of color scheme selection. It looks complex, but after a few minutes you won’t be able to live without it.”

Color Synth Axis

It really is worth investing time in Color synthAxis. I imagine it would be difficult to use the plethora of tools on this site without a Wacom pad. It involves a lot of sliding minute squares to produce changes, which would be hard to achieve with any degree of subtle control with a mouse.

It would be tedious for all of us if I tried to explain the interface, so I simply recommend that you take the time to get to know this brilliant diamond in the spectrum of colour themed sites.

Now here’s a link to a fairly exhaustive list of websites devoted to the art of presenting colour.
Get digging! And may all your projects be covered in swathes of beautifully co-ordinated colours.
Or Colors.