A huge part of design is picking colors. One thing I’ve never been particularly good at is choosing a color palette. Thankfully, there are sites out there that do nothing but catalog and explore color palettes, and I thought I’d share my two favorites.
The first is Kuler from Adobe. It’s a Flash-based application that lets you build, share, search for and browse color palettes, all submitted by other users. It also has some really fun features, like pulling a color palette from a photo on Flickr (my favorite photo sharing site) and easy export into the various Adobe design apps, like Photoshop and Illustrator. The color palette at the top of this post is the highest ranked from the last 30 days.
My other favorite is a site and blog called Colour Lovers. The blog is fantastic and a great way to broaden your exposure to palettes and get a sense for where these things come from. It’s in my list of daily reads on Bloglines and I highly recommend following it if you’re interested in color (or colour).
1 reply on “Exploring Colors”
Hey Ben, you should check out http://hexday.com I started it as a little experiment to what would happen if you only allowed people to pick 1 color a day to represent how they feel, their favorite, etc. It’s been going for about 9 months now with a couple of thousand picks, you can see trends and patterns. A few weeks ago I added a color sampler feature which is very much like ffffound. But it works with pulling a palette out of any image online.