Top Tools to Pick the Best Website Color Schemes

Color scheme matters in website design.

Yes, there are other aspects of a brand such as messaging, images, and fonts.

But color sets the underlying tone for emotion. A good consistent color scheme can create a strong, recognizable brand on your website, social media, and print marketing. It can evoke instant reactions overtime whenever someone sees the color of your brand.

Related Read: You Don’t Need Photoshop: 3 Free & Easy Graphic Design Tools

Here’s an example of how colors can evoke emotions:

Maybe you’re doing some rebranding for your website or you want some custom colors for a specific campaign. Maybe you’re looking for complementary colors for your brand’s primary color.

You may have a general idea of what colors to use, but what shade do you choose? Creating a good color scheme may seem easy, but it’s actually really difficult. There are a million ways to use blue and green, but using the wrong shades together can look really ugly.

You could try eyeballing it yourself, and more than likely come out with something that’s hard to look at. You could hire a cheap designer to come up with something decent. You could hire an expensive designer to come up with something good.

Or you can refer to some of these free resources that help you pick out the perfect colors for your brand, even if you consider yourself color blind when it comes to design.

Google Material Design

Google’s design focuses on simple and intuitive user interfaces, and they want the same for their customers who build websites and apps. So they created Material Design, which is a set of guidelines on good design, covering everything from fonts to layouts to icons to colors.

Their color palette guide is great if you have a general idea of what color to use, but aren’t sure what shade to use. They’ve identified color shades that work really well together, as well as given guidelines on how to pick the best color combinations.

COLOURLovers

This website is a collection of color palettes created by users all over the world. Palettes range from 2 to 5 colors, and represent both subtle and dynamic colors. Some will have links to see how the color scheme is displayed on their websites.

If you’re looking for inspiration, this is a great place to browse through palettes, collect your favorite ones, and either modify them or create your own.

Color Palettes

Color Palettes takes a really unique approach by creating color schemes from existing photos. This is great for creating palettes that are really organic in feel.

You can browse their color palettes by category, such as warm, cool, pastel and contrasting. You can also browse palettes by color as well.

Coolors

This site takes a fun approach on picking a color palette. You can randomly generate color schemes quickly and go through them until you find one you like. If you like a particular color or colors in a palette, you can lock them, and continue randomly generating the remaining colors around it. Even though it’s random, the colors do match each other well.

Coolors also let’s you upload your own photo and it’ll generate a few different color schemes from that photo, or allow you to create a focus point for it to generate colors around. This is great if you have an image or product photo that really captures your brand.

Related Read: 10 Best Sites for Free & Unique Stock Photos

Paletton

This tool puts more control in your hands. First, you start with a primary color. Paletton then has various color combination settings – monochromatic, adjacent, triad, and tetrad – that generate various color schemes. From there you can fine tune to get the best setting.

This is good for users who have a good grasp of color theory and are very intentional about the colors they use. Its a tool to help hone in on the precision color scheme you’re looking for.

Which resource you use depends on how quickly you want to find a color scheme and how proficient you feel in choosing colors. You may even use a few of the resources in conjunction with each other to find your perfect color palette.

Even if you have no background in design and are oblivious to color combinations, taking advantage of these resources with help you create a color scheme that helps make your website engaging and your brand memorable.