7Free Online Apps to Help You Pick a Color Scheme
The color scheme is the first thing that hits a visitors eyes when they find a new website. Before they notice the headers, the photos, before they read the text, the color scheme always has an immediate, visceral impact.
Furthermore, we associate a strong color scheme with whatever its attached to. When we say red, white and blue, what do you think of? Obviously, the American flag. What about red, blue and gold? Superman. A strong color scheme is how you make a first impression on a website visitor. Here are seven apps (that are totally free) to help you come up with a perfect scheme.
Color Schemer
Great little Mac app to help you determine color schemes. Its free, but its really a full software package with color wheels, format converters, the works. If youre a Mac user and getting a little tired of worrying about OS compatibility, look no further.
Color Tools
Lots of free color tools here (hence the site name, Color Tools). You can check out color blenders, color scheme remixers, and a handy little color scheme chooser. All compatible with Hex, CMYK and even .txt file color codes.
Color Scheme Designer 3
A really cool, really fun, website embedded color scheme designer. Visit the site, and we guarantee youll be lost for hours playing around with the color wheel, wheter or not you have anything in particular to work on. Great for unclogging those creative blocks we all get from time to time.
VMS Color Picker Pro 1.0
Nice little professional grade utility for picking color schemes. It really is professional grade, free or not, including HTML color display letting you see how the colors will look online.
Finch Color Manager 1.2
This Windows based color manager lets you input HEX and RGB to come up with great color schemes. The description on the download page is written in somewhat broken English, but fear not, the program comes well-reviewed.
Color Blender
Neat little website-embedded color scheme blender. Input a color scheme, and it will automatically generate some more setups for you. Pretty handy if you just need some extra color schemes fast and dont have time to play around with Color Scheme Designer.
Color Calculator
Now heres a cool app. It not only helps you arrange color scheme, its also backed by aesthetic philosophy to help you come up with a certain image through the color scheme, how to match cool and warm colors together, how to arrange a bold, subtle or aggressive color scheme. If youre ever lacking for inspiration, try this app out.
Gil Smith writes about how to apply to web design colleges
