Vandelay Design

Find the Perfect Colors for Your Website

Published July 4th, 2007 in Design

Color choice is a crucial decision in every website design. Sometimes you may be designing a site for an existing business that already has an established color scheme, but many design projects will require development of a color scheme. Fortunately, there are almost endless resources online to help you find that perfect color combination. We have gathered the resources that we feel are the most useful and categorized them below.

ARTICLES

The Psychology and Meaning of Colors:

Choosing Colors:

Reference:

TOOLS

There are an almost endless number of tools online that will help you to find the right color scheme. These tools come in many different varieties. Below we have listed the tools that we have found to be the most useful.

Sample Color Shemes/Combinations:

Tools to Help You Develop a Color Scheme:

Tools to Get Colors from an Image:

Other Tools:

If you liked this post, check out these other posts of interest:

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173 Responses to “Find the Perfect Colors for Your Website”

devnic July 4th, 2007

Excellent resource. Thank you!

Suman July 5th, 2007

Hi,

It’s an excellent article. You have mentioned that white is considered an unlucky colour in India, that’s not true. It’s considered as a colour of peace and purity. You will see this colour being very widely used in the websites of India.

Thanks

edward July 5th, 2007

Very good links, it will help a lot with the next template design.

Thanks a million.

IhateDesign July 6th, 2007

thanks for the tips!!!

Vandelay Design July 6th, 2007

Edward,
Thanks for reading. I’m glad you’ll be able to use some of these resources in your work.

Devnic,
I clicked through to your site and joined DevelopersNiche. Thanks for visiting.

Suman,
I think what you’re referencing was in one of the articles that I linked to. I have no idea about colors and Indian cultural, but thanks for your feedback.

devnic July 7th, 2007

Thanks for stopping by. My users are liking the new resource I am creating at developersniche.com. My main website is http://www.joomlaprodigy.com with a nice userbase of around 16000 members and most of them are members at developersniche also. Hope to see more of your excellent work listed on developersniche in future. Keep going…

Giancarlo Di Massa July 10th, 2007

Hello again,
upon closer examination of your article, I did find out that it was indeed original content, I think not even based on my one.

I kindly apologize for any mistakes done.

Mike July 10th, 2007

Nice set of links. You might want to consider adding:
http://www.calcresult.com/computing/web/hex_colour_maths.html
which allows you to calculate the correct colour values to use to get a smooth gradient in your HTML or CSS

kappe July 10th, 2007

http://www.designlinkdatabase.net/colordatas/search.aspx
this website has color search.

Jermayn Parker July 13th, 2007

Thank you :)

Very handy indeed

Vandelay Design July 19th, 2007

Mike and Kappe,
Thanks for the resources.

Jermayn,
Thanks for your feedback.

bryan July 31st, 2007

wow..nice blog indeed.awesome links..here also find some more links for web services.
http://www.colorpixels.net

mamat August 4th, 2007

Itsall that i need for now. Thanx Buddy…

Nathan Chapman August 11th, 2007

Good Article. It helped me quite a bit. I also find that Kuler, by Adobe, is a very good colour scheme tool.

Vandelay Design August 11th, 2007

Nathan,
Thanks for reading. I’m glad it helped.

Cameron September 3rd, 2007

Perfect timing to find this post. I am working on a couple of sites and this list is golden.

Vandelay Design September 3rd, 2007

Cameron,
I’m glad you found some things you can use.

Leon September 16th, 2007

Whenever I find perfect colors, I pick them right off the screen and into my SwatchBook so I never loose them. Maybe you could add it to your list. http://www.pagepainter.com/swatchBookInAction.htm

The Design Guy September 24th, 2007

Hi,

I’ve just written an article on “How To Find The Perfect Colors To Design Beautifully & Communicate Effectively”.

I’d really appreciate it if you would include it in your list of resource.

Here’s the url:
http://www.pagethinker.com/how-to-find-the-perfect-colors-for-your-design-to-communicate-effectively.html

Sherman

Jaume December 16th, 2007

It’s a great help! Thank you very much!

Rajat Bhadani January 29th, 2008

I have made an interesting color pallete following the fashion color trends for the year 2008 – have a look

thanks

peri oyunları March 9th, 2008

şt can takes days to dicede correct colors for your site. sometimes i can’t decide what colors to use and gets crayz.

enfopedia March 15th, 2008

great tips, love it very useful information.

Jak March 25th, 2008

Main to not do a site dark, I so consider

Bloomtools April 9th, 2008

Ideal Colors Palate is the basic ingridiants of your website presence.

Top Software Development Company India April 9th, 2008

hi,
this site in use color and design good

kremalicious April 17th, 2008

what wonderful resources and links. thanks for this

Web Developer India April 24th, 2008

Dear All,

Sub:- Please help me out on Wiki Web Design

I have puzzled with the task of Wiki Web Design & Development Strategies, and very much eager to know these questions:

1 Whether should we prepare for the final presentation of our Wiki Web Design work?

2 Will is it exact task of web programming? Or the content of the website can be something we fetch?

Thanks

Best wishes!

Dexterous SEO India (Search Engine Optimization) Company April 26th, 2008

I won’t go so deep with the definition of Wiki but if you are not familiar with it, they are websites that anyone can freely edit and optimize to grow through collaboration; This Wiki software is developed by Ward Cunningham to exchange ideas between computer programmers. Wiki Web Design is an incredibly fun skill to learn – combining the latest technology with the creativity of Wiki web design. Wiki merely supports hyperlinks & has simple text syntax for creating new pages and cross links between any numbers of pages on the fly.

Thanks & Regards

Dexterous SEO India

Mr. Golden May 7th, 2008

Very good resource. I know about a lot of those.

If you want to search for even more, then you can try searching for custom/personal wikis.

Andos May 9th, 2008

Nice articles, trying to get the best color for my blog

Joker May 9th, 2008

Confuse to pick a color

Ben May 20th, 2008

Nice collection – here are some more excellent colour resources:

Applying Color Theory to Digital Displays
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000163.php

Color Theory for Digital Displays: A Quick Reference: Part I
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000069.php

Ensuring Accessibility for People With Color-Deficient Vision
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000164.php

Health Blog June 20th, 2008

Nice info, I hope you can visit my blog, see the colour and tell me about it. Thank you

sOhbeT July 27th, 2008

thank you!

çok güzel hareketler bunlar August 17th, 2008

thanks.

Sohbet August 26th, 2008

Thank you very much It is enough knowledge

Jim O'Shea August 27th, 2008

This is a first attempt at a website. I have to learn how to get into it and change it. Is there anything in it that puts you off, (apart from how some of it is worded)? I am hoping to put in a video clip, but am hopelessly ignorant about websites and all that has to do with them. I am hoping to get someone to teach me.

Indianapolis Web Design September 4th, 2008

Picking the right colors is so important and should not be taken lightly in web design. I am having my first boy after two girls and I am experiencing in life what I already knew on the web. People’s emotions are strongly tied to color pallets.

Bogdan Popescu September 16th, 2008

A great List of Tools!
Thank you for the help. I have recently written another article, or better, I have updated an old article in th attempt to emphasize the influence that colors have on site visitors:
http://www.avangate.com/articles/color-web-site_59.htm

masterza September 23rd, 2008

Color solution truly are the basis of attractive web pages! Learned a lot smarter thanks!

Outsource Web Design September 30th, 2008

Being a web design company ourselves, really appreciate the great work dedicated to the community. Educating our entire team on all the resources. Great resources list. Thank you so much for it.

Ooty Tour October 13th, 2008

Im a Color Lover. These resourses helps me to boost my skills on color themes. Thanks a lot.

http://www.ootytour.com

Sohbet November 28th, 2008

Im a Color Lover. These resourses helps me to boost my skills on color themes. Thanks a lot.
Sohbet http://www.adamca.net

tyas December 17th, 2008

thank you for the link..
this article is what i’ve been looking for..
sometimes we think we chose the right color for our blog, but only in couple days we realize that the chosen color is not suit with the content or the soul of the blog. It’s really helpful..

EDI Solutions January 10th, 2009

Nice color resources. Thanks for this great links really useful for me to improve the color knowledge.

Sohbet February 19th, 2009

os colores de las páginas web. Por cierto, a los interesados en el tema os recomiendo empezar por leerse los enlaces de este artículo

kampanye damai pemilu indonesia 2009 February 22nd, 2009

thanks for share this tip’s

joyoge designers' bookmark February 23rd, 2009

Nice color resources. thanks for the list..

nokiawadd March 4th, 2009

alameda homes
absolutely agree with the authour, in fact, science is organized knowledge and wisdom is organized life
nokiawad9981

themisfit March 19th, 2009

What a great resource. this will come in handy.

IgorOsa April 6th, 2009

Thanks for job! Excellent site :)

Riley April 26th, 2009

Surprised not to see 45colors.com on the list

OI Web Designer May 14th, 2009

really i need this post…
i will bookmark it…
thank for share…

HD Wallpapers May 30th, 2009

Good post.
Web site color combinations decides your returning visitors !

lisa June 23rd, 2009

A great deal of your theme’s success will depend on the color choices you make.

Website Design Services July 6th, 2009

I think every web designer should study Color Psychology. It brings a new perspective on how to design. I have been lately and I’m hoping I can draw in visitors by psychology.

4design July 15th, 2009

Some articles really helpful, but more like tools for working with color. Thank you!

Black Katz - rent in London August 3rd, 2009

Just seen this after deliberating colours for my blog. Thanks for all the resources – I hadn’t realised there was so much psychology behind it all.

casino August 10th, 2009

Thanks to this post! Really interesting and helpful as well. Keep posting!

consacepo August 23rd, 2009

A longtime enthusiast for this blog, I like the fresh design and love your decision to put reader comments back on the blog…truly good websites HAVE to be interactive!

Larissa September 16th, 2009

Thanks for the links on color! Here is a review of colors and their meanings and the importance of using the right color in a design: http://ljdesignstudio.com/the-meaning-of-color-in-design

SWP November 4th, 2009

could have used this list while redesigning my previous blog.

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