6 Smart Color Resources for Designers
by Margaret Penney | November 4, 2016
A great design consists of a variety of elements, typography, layout, use of space.. and quite importantly—color. Choosing your color palette for a project can make or break its effectiveness and appeal. Listed here are top resources to help you take the guesswork out of coming up with amazing color schemes.
Adobe Color CC
Adobe Color CC is a great tool for extracting a color palette from an image. Just take a picture with your iPhone and Adobe Color will parse and present the color palette from that image. You can easily create and collect palettes this way and integrate them within Adobe applications for use in your designs.
Stylify Me
Stylify Me is an innovative color resource created by Annebelle Yoon and Michael Mrowetz that helps designers quickly gather information about the style guide of any given site. Just type in a site URL and it will come back with the color values in addition to a variety of other style information as well. A great resource for finding out what colors are used in your favorite websites.
Colour Lovers
Colour Lovers is a smartly-designed color repository and community. You can look up palettes by color or value, like RGB and Hexadecimal. Colors are also organized by popularity and market. Since it’s a community visitors rate the colors by their own personal preference providing valuable insight into what color combinations people really like.
Coolers
Coolers is a smartly designed app with many useful features. You can gather color from images, choose color fast by pressing the spacebar, and adjust and refine temperatures by temperature, hue, saturation and brightness. Palettes can be collected, shared and stored on the Cloud as well. Color values are easy to find for integration into stylesheets.
Color Hex
Color Hex is a color resource created for web designers and developers interested in generating color values for end-use in stylesheets. The website design is very straightforward and basic, which makes it easy to use to get just the information you need. The color space information it provides is quite thorough and includes RGB, HSL, HSV, CMYK, XYZ, Hunter Lab, and CIE-Lab values.
Design Seeds
Design Seeds is a curated collection of color palettes from designers around the world that are largely inspired by nature and our environment. The experts at Design Seeds love color and carefully craft excellent palettes that can be used by other creatives in their projects.
NOTE from our sponsors: Also try the Sessions College Color Calculator; it’s a free online tool that makes it easy to select and modify color schemes based on traditional color harmonies.
Margaret Penney is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Margaret is a teacher, designer, writer and new media artist and founder of Hello Creative Co.
If you are interested in learning more about using color, Sessions College offers a Color Theory course and many other graphic design courses for students at all levels. Contact Admissions for more information.
This blog is powered by Sessions College, the leading online school of visual arts.
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