Tools To Help You Choose Your Website Color Scheme | Hacker News Reader

Tools To Help You Choose Your Website Color Scheme

techiemania.com

150 pointsbinarray200016 comments

The best weapon in your arsenal is a designer (human).

I built a theme using a palette from colorcombos.com, and thought it was just great. When I suggested the same colours to have a logo created, the designer I worked with tweaked them without even asking.

When I applied the new colour to the website, it knocked the wind out of me. Some people have the gift. There's no replacement for an artist who understands what you're trying to express.

She managed to change the way I feel about my own project.

Well, these are merely tools. Just like every tool, the user must be able to judge and finetune the output, and re-adjust when needed. At the very least, using such tools you won't be hurting anyones eyes. But you possibly won't be taking any awards either.

I agree. When human designers are not around, however, and I urgently need a 5-color diverging, colorblind safe, print friendly palette, I go to http://colorbrewer2.org/

Who was the designer?

Please drop me an email (see my profile) if you want to get in touch with her.

Please revise the title to conform to the guidelines, thank you!

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

Until the submission guidelines are summarized on the submission page, people should stop whining about the wording of titles.

I disagree. It's a nice idea to summarize and link to the guidelines, but this 'whining' actually helps to make good titles.

For some reason copy->paste didn't work in this case. I need to improve my QA when submitting articles to HN. :-)

It's worth knowing the back-story to Kuler as it relates to another great color resource named ColourLovers:

http://www.colourlovers.com/web/blog/2007/07/06/for-the-reco...

Thanks - I was wondering about this. I've used ColourLovers.com for years, but I've never heard of Kuler until today.

As a designed I really find this kind of tools useless. Especially when I get a color scheme delivered by the client.

It's not so much about that I'm an awesome designer (although I like to entertain that view of myself), but that five blocks of solid color says very little about how the colors will be used.

One problem is that the amount of colors you use and what elements get what color will completely change the impression of the design. A block of solid orange also can't express the subtle effect of gradients. Have a look at the spoon in this photo for an example: http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/tea-8.jpg

Another problem is optical illusions. The perception of colors change very much with how much of them you see. A thin text will need to be darker that a bold headline to appear equal, and one color will look different next to two others (making a solid color look like a gradient next to an actual gradient).

The tool that would be useful would be an editor that lets you pick colors for specific stereotype elements of a website, like a h1-h3 header, body text/background, blockquote, logo etc, combined with font, textsize and boldness.

I can recommend these two:

* http://colorlovers.com

* http://colorschemedesigner.com

I'm not totally happy with any I've tried yet (they all have some glaring UI annoyances) but http://colorschemedesigner.com/ has been pretty useful for me.

someone recently posted this on HN, colorapi.com... generated color palettes from flickr image search.

also uses node.js :-)

All you need is some basic color theory and adobe kuler http://kuler.adobe.com/ which is a helpful tool, integrated into CS applications. This applies to all color related work. Kuler is the best option if you're using CS.

On color theory you can check out: http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/product/472/Color-The...

There was also an fxphd course, but I don't think it's available anymore.

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