Website Design Articles :: Web Colour Schemes

Web colour schemes

Looking for some inspiration for your web colour scheme? Then have a look at some of the tools below.

Colorblender is a free online tool for colour matching and palette design!

To get started, choose a preferred colour using the RGB sliders and a 6-colour matching palette (a "blend") will be automatically calculated displayed in RGB and # values. Using the radio buttons you may switch to Direct Edit mode to tweak or edit individual colors of your blend.

Blends can be saved for future use, and providing your browser accepts cookies, will be available whenever you return to the site from the same workstation.

The Colour Scheme Generator is an extremely useful and comprehensive tool providing five different scheme variations (monochromatic, contrast, triad, tetrad and analogic). Pick a colour from a colour wheel and you can view dark pastel, light pastel variations and change the hue and saturation. Schemes can be viewed in web palette colours, normal vision or adjusted to simulate eight different sorts of colour blindness. You can also save a scheme by bookmarking its url. A downloadable version (50kb zip file) is also available to use offline.

Also worth a look is Jemima Pereira's 4096 Colour Wheel.

By hovering over the wheel you can choose from any of the colours and see their related web-safe, web-smart and unsafe values. Click on a colour and the web-smart colour will be added to a table allowing you to see your chosen colours in proximity to each other.

Another box allows you to see variations in saturation for the last selected hue.

The Return of Design who have 'colour schemes galore' and have just overhauled their colour scheme archive to provide some exciting new functionality for designers.

Listing a variety of colour schemes in their archive (which will be updated frequently), you can also view variations of your chosen scheme, as well as viewing information and variations on individual colours.