That is, just as long as that color matches the rest of your color scheme. What’s that you say? You haven’t planned out what your color scheme is going to be yet and you are just randomly putting colors together? Well stop right there! Help has arrived.
There are several sites out there that can help you on your way to an aesthetically pleasing website. After all, you don’t want to be that site, and you know the one that I am talking about. The one that has the black background, white text and blue, red and purple links! Well, do you? I didn’t think so. To help you avoid that fate, I’ll talk about a couple that I use myself in deciding on a color palette to work from.
ColorJack: Sphere has a very handy tool so that when you move any one of the color choice dots around on the color sphere, the other dots are adjusted accordingly to give you a multi-color palette. This can then be exported to Photoshop, Illustrator or even to a simple URL with a click of the mouse. There are many tweaks and settings for the advanced designer but it is so easy even a small child could create a great looking color scheme here.
Well Styled’s Color Scheme Generator II uses a similar style for selecting your base colors and it also allows you to choose quick variations on the scheme such as pastels, pales, and contrasts easily. It shows your palette choices in an easy to copy and paste manner to the side.
Kuler from Adobe allows you to browse and grab themes from other users or create your own. The cool thing they have here is that you can even upload a photo of your own and it will analyze it, extract the colors and create a suitable palette to use with it. If you don’t have your own photo, you can just use the interface they have with Flickr and choose one from there. You can join the community and save your themes and they even have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.
COLOURlovers describes itself as “a resource that monitors and influences color trends.” They have a large community of contributors and lots to explore. You can create new palettes and patterns here that you can save and share with others as well as use for yourself. This site is definitely worth a visit.
There are many more out there that do many of the same things, but the most important thing to know is that unless you just happen to have a degree in graphic design, chances are you may want to use a site like one of those the next time you start to build a website.