Five Fantastic Colour Scheme Generators

Picking the colour scheme is one of the hardest aspects in design to get right. It is almost as important as the code or the content of your site. When looking for inspiration today it is easy to become overwhelmed with all the different options, but here are 5 tools that are fantastic at doing the job for you.

Kuler

Kuler, the flashed based colour palette generator from adobe has to be at the top of the list. It has a bustling community which creates some truly amazing colour schemes. All the schemes can be exported as Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ASE) format which works with any of Adobe’s Creative Suite applications. Kuler can also be downloaded as a adobe air app [direct link].

Palette Grabber

Palette Grabber is a FireFox plugin which gives you the colour palette of any website downloadable in many different formats for use in popular graphical programs such as ACO for Creative Suite and GPL for gimp. It’s perfect for bookmarking and saving the different colour schemes for inspirational website’s.

ColorJack

ColorJack is an online generator that lets you hover over a colour on the site’s grid to see themes that use that colour. You can select which format you want to see your colour scheme in (hsv, rgb, or hex). It doesn’t quite have the community aspect of Kuler, but it does have some other interesting tools such as Colour Galaxy, Colour Sphere and Colour Studio which lets you create your own colour scheme.

ColorZilla

ColorZilla is a Firefox extension that allows you to determine the colour value of any point in your browser. It displays the colour value in both RGB and HEX.

ColourLovers

COLOURlovers is the ultimate resource for all things colour related. It is a social site that gives people the ability to share and rate colour palettes and read colour related articles.