Color Combinations for the Web

(This post is updated regularly.)

If you’re wanting to design an eye-catching website, it’s always helpful to know a little about color theory. The most useful book I’ve found on the subject is the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color; I keep it on my shelf as an ongoing reference resource.

In addition to the background knowledge provided by the Pantone Guide, there are a number of excellent color scheme tools online that will help you put together some sharp color combinations for the web. Here are my favorites:

Color Combinations

• Color Combinations - searchable color combo library, combo tester, and website color grabber.
  
• Colour Lovers - find pre-made color palettes. Bonus tools include the pattern library and COPASO color tool.
• Color Palette by Photo - get a color palette that matches any online image. (Adobe Kuler below offers a similar tool.)
• Name That Color - put names to colors. Sure your friend knows exactly what color periwinkle is, but that doesn’t help you figure out what it looks like, much less apply it to a design in Adobe Fireworks.

Color Palette Tools

• Color Scheme Generator - a simple tool that generates some very sharp color schemes from a single color.
• Color Blender - get the steps between two colors.
• Color Wizard - an advanced color tool that returns a set of hue, saturation and tint/shade variations of your color, as well as suggests color schemes to you, based on your color’s complementary color, split complementary colors, analogous colors and other variations.
• Adobe Kuler - another advanced color palette tool. In addition to tools similar to the Color Wizard above, it can extract color themes from an image and display existing color themes made by other users. Big bonus: it provides the HSV, RGB, LAB, CMYK, and hexadecimal values for each color in the palette.