Color Tools every Amateur Designer Should Know About
Ask any competent web designer or blogger and they’ll tell you that one of the most important aspects of getting a webpage right is the color. Getting the colors right can make all the difference between a hugely successful website and one that goes down the toilet on day one. You need a site that is easy on the eyes if you want someone to stick around for more than five seconds.
Here are some sites I have found which can help you find the right colours, if you are designing a webpage.
One of my “can’t live without it” Firefox extensions. Have you ever seen a color on a webpage that you wished you could re-produce? No problemo. Just activate Colorzilla and point to the color on the page (with the mouse arrow, not your finger!). Colorzilla will then analyze it and tell you the RGB / HEX value so you can use it for your site too.
Once you have picked your colour, you can also double-click on the eye-dropper logo and this opens up a color palette where you can get different shades of the chosen color as well as being able to copy and paste the RGB / HEX value you need.
Another Firefox extension that allows you to temporarily change the colours on a webpage. Useful for seeing if a color is suitable before actually going ahead and changing anything.
When you want to remove the temporary colour, just click “Restore Page” and everything goes back to normal. You can also change text colors on a page too to experiment.
And now some sites that offer a wide range of color shades for your use on webpages :
- Color Schemer Online.
- 500+ named colors with RGB & HEX values (one of my personal favourites).
- Colors on the Web.
- Instant Color Schemes - this one is quite interesting as it invites you to enter keywords. The site then grabs photos from Yahoo Images, based on your keywords, and then takes the colours for you to copy.
- ColourLovers.
Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer, proofreader, editor and blogger. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net
This is also an extremely usefull tool for color schemes: http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html
Accesibar looks great, but “restore” button don’t work in my pc
@Dan : what operating system are you using? Windows XP?
Yes, Windows XP and Firefox portable updated to the latest Firefox version.
I have deactivated the extension because it changes the color of ALL pages and restore button doesn’t solve the situation.
No Javascript errors by the way, I took a look with Firebug and appears like an * { background-color:…} CSS rule is injected at all the pages
You forgot one of the better ones next to colourlovers and that’s http://kuler.adobe.com/
now i have a competition for my pixie cause you told me about colorzilla. thanks.
@ Dan
“… and appears like an * { background-color:…} CSS rule is injected at all the pages”. That’s stange