Find the Perfect Colors for Your Website

Published in Design

If you’re looking to learn more about design websites, please see our post Learn Web Design for plenty of resources to help your educational pursuit.

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:

Published July 4th, 2007 by

Ebook

Free E-book: Freelance Designer's Guide to Multiple Income Streams.
Enter your email address.

50 Responses

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…

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.

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

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.

Jak March 25th, 2008

Main to not do a site dark, I so consider

kremalicious April 17th, 2008

what wonderful resources and links. thanks for this

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

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.

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!

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..

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

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

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!

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.

ricky March 8th, 2010

Another great referense about color and web desing..
http://www.ueuh.com/internet/the-best-color-web-design/

kelowna photog March 15th, 2010

color is so important, these are great tools. Thanks for sharing.

Serge March 29th, 2010

Good collection. I’d like to study all list but i’m afraid there will not be enouch time to do this. Nevetheless thanks a lot of for publishing. I bookmarked it.

carson December 4th, 2010

color is the hardest this to design for. Thanks for the great tools.

anne May 18th, 2011

One more addition to your list – colorpilgrim.com – it has some of the best color schemes on the web and they are differentiated by mood, industry, color etc.

komikoyunlar June 16th, 2011

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

Jasim Muhammed August 4th, 2011

I must add one more website which helps grealty to findout how the color patterns are used in reality http://uicart.com gives the option for showcasing our works as well as other developers to search with colors

David December 4th, 2012

Good Post! I also believe color has major impact on emotion. This is a cool color picker I found, great for selecting website color combinations.

Leave a Reply