Careful colour choices are important for business branding. So the same considerations should be made to any online extension of your business, whether it’s a full scale e-commerce site, first-time blog or just the background of your business profile at Twitter.
Below are some helpful online tools and resources we really like:
degraeve.com is a colour palette generator. You enter the URL of an inspiration-image (might be your existing business logo, signature product or a tropical island scene – if you’re a travel agent) and a matching palette is automatically generated!
colorhunter.com is also a palette-from-image generator but we like how you can browse through loads of previously uploaded images, and their matching palettes. Handy if you haven’t decided what you might use as your own.
kuler.adobe.com is a web-hosted application that helps you generate new colour themes, or you can browse through thousands created by other users.
colourlovers.com serves the same purpose as kuler (and hundreds of other sites) but with so much more! This truly is an online community of colour lovers; featuring a really interesting blog and interviews with people about all things colour-driven. Plus, they’ve recently launched the most exciting application for Twitter we’ve ever seen! www.colourlovers.com/themeleon/twitter [If you really like colours and patterns, you will be equally excited].
squidfingers.com offers 158 pre-designed patterns that are free to use on your own site, or handy to send to your web developer/designer as examples of what you like.
bgpatterns.com is a really fun way to create your own website backgrounds by fiddling with a million variations of images, patterns, texture and colours.
inspirationfolder.com is an archive of over 20,000 screen grabs of beautifully designed sites. Excellent inspiration for colour palettes but also for layout and graphic design concepts.
www.smashingmagazine.com is the mother-load of inspiration. Enough said. Make a cuppa and get ready to start book marking your favourites.
gpeters.com provides quite an original option for colour scheme generation; combinations are based on words or phrases! We tried carnival, bordello and ‘work/life balance’ for some interesting results.
What are your favourite online resources for colour & design inspiration? Leave some links in the comment box!
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