Helpful Tools for Color Selection

If you're anything like me, choosing anything decisively is a struggle, especially when I don't even know where to start. It's not any different with choosing a color scheme either.This might sound like a small and pointless decision to have to make, but is one of the most important ones when it comes to web design. Many colors can have their own meaning behind them that make us feel a certain way when we see them. Blue can give a sense of trust, red might suggest passion, and Purple is often associated with royalty. Luckily, there are many tools out there that can help make the process of finding the right color for your website a little easier.

I found two articles that list their favorite color design tools to use. Surprisingly, only two tools were listed in both articles, leaving it even more difficult to determine what is the best one to use and how they all differ.

The first article I looked at was written collectively by the Creative Bloq Staff and gives a very brief overview of each tool. The other article I found was written by Matt Vogels from the site: Webflow.

Many of the tools listed seem simple and straightforward such as Coolors, Adobe Capture CC, Color Dot, and Adobe Color CC. These sites are simply to select the colors you want and export them as you wish.

Some tools, however, can serve a much more specific and helpful purpose. Khroma uses AI to help select the colors you want for you. Users select colors that they like to train the system to think like the user so that it can assist in the color picking process.

Canva Color Palette Generator and HueSnap allow the user to take or upload a picture and the systems will create a variety of color palettes to choose from based off of colors from the picture.

147 Colors focuses on helping to select colors from the limited standard colors across all platforms, monitors, and browsers.

www.eggradients.com

Eggradient is a great tool to use for inspiration as it uses professionally put together color gradients and fun shapes and names like “Jack Dorsey's Stock” and “Hodor’s Sentence”.

Some of these tools are better used to gain information on the colors. Color Calculator gives the user information on the color theory relating to the colors selected. Colorable allows users to test out their colors and get feedback about accessibility. The color combinations receive a rating that will let the user know if the combination is still viewable and comfortable to those with color blindness or other vision impairments.

If I was to make a website or logo now, using these sites would definitely be beneficial to me. I would recommend using more than one to really determine the right colors for you. I might use Eggradint to start the inspiration process, then move to Khroma or HueSnap to assist in picking the actual colors, and then take those colors to Color Calculator and Colorable to check on if they are user friendly.