How To Search For the Perfect Color Scheme

James Yeang — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:01:07 +0000

Color co-ordination is definitely not one of my strong suits. Ask my girlfriend and she’ll tell you what a mess I make just picking out matching clothes. For anyone like me who’s basically ‘design-challenged’, here are two awesome tools which will help you get perfectly color coordinated.

Search Color Schemes (Use Words)

Picking out a color scheme for your website? Not sure how to describe the actual colors you need? Try out ‘Instant Color Schemes’.

This excellent free service makes it easy for anyone to find an entire matching color scheme simply by typing in a word. For example, just search for ’sunset’, and color schemes related to ’sunset’ will be made available on the spot.

“Instant Color Schemes” makes full use of Yahoo’s image search API. How it works is that they take 5 related images from Yahoo Image Search and then show the most prominent 6 colors from each image and then find related colors to come up with the color schemes.

After some testing, it does work out pretty well in most cases. It did give me abnormal results once in a while (along with yellow and orange, pink and grey colors were displayed to me when I searched for ‘curry’!), but it looks to be a good product overall.

Search Color Schemes (Use Images)

Lost for words? If you are, you can let your favorite image do the talking. Sometimes words don’t cut it. This is especially true when you’re trying to pick colors to match certain objects, a painting or a statue for instance. Just upload a picture to Color Palette Generator and it will break down the key colors from within that photo and allow you to obtain a color scheme from that image.

Also of note is the fact that the source code for this project is available for free which means you can grab it, change and modify the code and put it to good use as well.

So there you go, two tools which will help you make the right decision about colors – all the time.

You might also want to check out The Best 3 Tools to Search for Images Online by Color by Ann.

How do you pick color schemes? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Related posts

The Best 3 Tools to Search for Images Online by Color

Ann Smarty — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:01:30 +0000

Image search is evolving quickly. Today you don’t even need to use words to search images. Now you can use colors!. That’s right you can search images by color.

Let’s search the web for an autumn-like palette (yellow, red, brown) using the following 3 services. Let’s see how the search results are like.

1. PicItUp

PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.

Test it: search for [autumn] and choose any color from the left column (I chose yellow). Now let’s look at the results:

Impressive, isn’t it?

What the tool lacks: you can’t combine several colors to refine your search (for example you can’t search for a yellow-red palette) – you are only able to search for one color.

2. Multicolr

Unlike the above one, with the Flickr-based Multicolr (already mentioned at Make Use Of) service you can combine as many colors as you want.

Test it: choose several colors and watch how the image list changes with each color added (I combined red and yellow):

What the tool lacks:you can’t combine word-based and color-based searches with this service. You are limited with playing with colors only.

3. Etsy

Etsy, an online shop of handmade products, has developed color search for their own product database.

Test it: It’s real fun to play with. Just browse your mouse across the screen and watch various colors and same-palette products pop up.

What the tool lacks: here you are unable to either set the color option or the search term. Nonetheless the tool is such fun to use that you definitely need to try it out.

Now, what do you think could be possible practical applications for these tools?

Would you use them on a regular basis or are they just for fun?