Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

One of the quickest way to come up with the right colors is to use ColorPicker. Simple, but with all the necessary features, it has hex input, a color slider and the ability to save colors to a palette. You can also choose from generated palettes with complementary, triade, tetrade and analogic colors. The only thing that may make this tool even better would be to add the ability to change the background color of the page itself.

Another free tool by the creator of Colorzilla is the Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator, an online tool that easily lets you create and customize your own designs, or the given presets and will output cross-browser HTML5 / CSS3 gradients (an HTML5 feature) without you having to create images as repeating backgrounds. With the gradient editor control you can add and remove stops, change color and position etc. You can edit the size (great for nav bars and backgrounds) and preview the results and copy and paste the generated CSS into your stylesheet.

Useful for all kinds of color tasks that may otherwise require several programs, Colorzilla puts a lot of tools useful for web designers into a simple to use extension for Firefox. Get color readings that you can then adjust and paste into other programs, measure distance between two points on a page, choose from pre-defined color sets and save the most used colors in custom palettes. You can also get info about DOM elements with the DOM spying feature. All in all, it’s a useful eyedropper tool, color picker and palette viewer that’s always ready to go right from your browser.

A fun tool at 2CreateAWebsite is based on a spinning color wheel lets you choose colors from the wheel or add hex code to create matching color schemes. Somewhat limited it its function it serves the purpose of finding matching shades of a hue you may already be using in your project.

Another free and very easy to use color scheme is designer is offered by InfoHound. You can set the saturation, brightness and hue with sliders or enter a particular value directly into one of the boxes. Matching colors will be automatically chosen, which may help a great deal if you’re looking for some new ideas. You can click on any one to set it as the primary color.

ColoRotate features a 3D cone that lets you choose your colors quickly by manipulating hue and tint within the cone. The cone flips and spins and makes mixing and blending the colors fun! You can get your starting colors from an image and manipulate the whole palette at once. You can save, export and share your palettes and browse through palettes others have created.

Creating color schemes for your designs is very easy with Color Scheme Designer’s free color scheme tool. Start with selecting a monochrome, complementary, triad, tetrad, analogic or accented analogic option. Then select your hue and temperature and this color scheme generator will do the rest. It will also generate a sample web page to see how your colors will look together on an actual page – nice!

Often a little automated help is great when creating a color palette. With SlayerOffice’s free color palette generator tool you choose the base color and it will create 10 shades of the base color at varying degrees of opacity. By default five shades emulate opacity over a white background, the other five over black, but you can change these blending colors as well. This free tool will display hexidecimal color values,or comma delimited RGB values.

Isolated colors may look beautiful but in combination with other colors may look muddy, or ‘change’ their main hue altogether. If you want to avoid surprises, try ColorCombos’ combotester. You get to pick up to four colors either by hex code, or through a visual pop-up; the combotester then lets you test the colors in any sequence. The large size swatches make it easy to get a feel for which colors look right next to one another and makes this a useful website tool for anyone who works with color. You can also choose from some color presets and change options like adding text, or having combotester get complementary colors for you.

Colourlovers.com is a ‘colour lover’ community with thousands of colors, patterns and palettes available for download. “COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color – whether for ad campaigns, product design, or even in architectural specification – a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.”