FREE COLOR TOOLS FOR DESIGNERS
We know very well, as designers, how important color is in designing a website or defining a brand. Choosing the right color palette for a specific project gives us guarantees of a possible success.
“Color does not add a pleasant quality to design — it reinforces it.” — Pierre Bonnard
Color is able to evoke sensations that can affect people psychologically and emotionally. Depending on the purpose of the web project we are developing, it is, therefore, essential to choose the colors well considering the type of users involved, the category of the advertised product and the idea to be expressed.
To find the right color we can resort to a series of tools that facilitate our choice. You can use predefined color palettes or UI design tools that show how to combine colors effectively.
In this article I have selected a series of new color tools made in the last year, found by consulting the best projects on Product Hunt. Take a look!
SITE PALETTE — Chrome Extension –
This new Chrome extension allows you to generate complete palettes from any website.
You can extract the color scheme from your favorite websites and then use it in your project.
The palette returned to you by “Site Palette” is divided into 3 sections:
- Colour Cube
Create a grid of 3D histograms, look for the local maxima of the number of hits - Median cut
Group similar colors in the 3D model, sort them by volume and return the basic colors for each block - Material design
Based on the Palette class of Android SDK
You can also share the permalink or download palette templates in Sketch and Adobe Swatch.
I think it’s a great extension, allowing you to get inspiration from the palettes of the best websites.
You can download the extension here ? Site Palette
KHROMA COLORS— AI Color Tool –
Khroma is an AI color tool designed to create countless color combinations for design projects.
This tool allows you to choose a combination of 50 colors to your liking and combines them thanks to Artificial Intelligence. In practice, you’ll train a neural network powered algorithm to generate colors that you like and block ones you don’t, all directly in your browser.
Khroma has learned from thousands of color palettes stored on the internet and is able to generate excellent combinations. The search made by this AI color tool, allows you to filter the generator by hue, tint, values, color, as well as hex and RGB values.
You could create an unlimited library with a combination of your favourite colours as a reference for your projects.
Khroma certainly deserves a test even just to try the power of Artificial Intelligence in the search for combinations.
Start making colors work for you!
Try ? Khroma
FLAT UI COLORS 2
Flat UI Colors was born in 2013 as a collection of color palettes to inspire designers in their creative process. Since then over 25 million people have copied the colors from the site to use them in their work.
Flat UI Colors 2 is the continuation of this project created by Ahmet Sülek.
This collection of color palettes was born thanks to the collaboration of 13 designers from 13 different countries and brings together 14 color palettes and 280 colors.
If you want to know more about the designers who participated in the project, you can read this article on Medium: “Flat UI Colors 2–13 Countries, 13 Designers, 13 More Color Palette”.
Colours can be copied in RGB, RGBA and HEX format.
Take a look, you’ll surely find inspiration
PIGMENT -GRADIENT – DUOTONE
Pigment is a tool that allows you to explore color combinations by changing the intensity of the pigment and lighting.
It’s a design tool that is very useful during the brainstorming phase when the project idea is being developed, giving the possibility to discover multiple color combinations.
It was developed by Shapefactory which, in addition to Pigment, has also developed other tools to help designers create their projects. These tools are Gradient and Duotone.
The first, Gradient, creates color gradients that can be modified by controlling the angle as well as the pigment and lighting.
While the second generates a beautiful duotone effect in seconds on your images and already provides a set of color combinations to create this effect.
To try Pigment and other Shapefactory tools, click here ? Shapefactory
COLORS
Colors is a data-driven collection of color palettes based on a curation of beautiful designs.
The curator of this series of palettes, collected for a year on over 800 beautiful designs on Pixels, extracted the colors from the screenshots and decided to create this collection with the collected data.
Definitely worth a visit to get some inspiration
? Colors
COLORSPARK
Finally I want to talk about ColorSpark, a tool that generates random colors and nuances. A simple tool that can help in the initial design phase of a project. It is designed to stimulate new ideas, helping you find new colors that otherwise would not be thought of.
Generate your color here ? ColorSpark
Conclusions ?
Colors are fantastic, they express emotions, they are able to influence people, they are part of our life in all respects. We can inspire ourselves by observing the colors that nature gives us or we can imagine them.
When we create a project and we design our color palette it’s important to understand what we want to express, the goal and the user to whom it is addressed. Once this analysis is done, we look for a combination of colors that best represents it by helping us with tools, like the ones I have listed above.
Do not be afraid to use them and let yourself be inspired, create your project giving the best of you.
Enjoy the color!