xhtml | css | DesignThe republic of Jens Wedin (with me as the president)

Color is a microconsciousness. Like our senses of taste and smell, color helps us to understand the world around us. It helps us survive as a species, and appreciate works of art. (Causes of colours)

I been trying to find some resources about colours, how to use them, how to build a nice colour map, what problems colour blind people have with colours etc. This is what I found when scanning the web. If you have something else that is good, please let me know.

## Colour scheme pickers

4096 Color Wheel is really beautiful and nice way of picking colours from the colour wheel.

Color palette: Online palette maker, add an base colour and get an nice colour palette.

It will create 10 shades of the base color, located top-left, at varying degrees of opacity. The top row emulates opacity over a white background, the bottom over black.

synthAxis is a flash based colour selector, quoting the site.

Color synthAxis is a free online tool designed to simplify the nightmare of color scheme selection. It looks complex, but after a few minutes you won’t be able to live without it.

As it said, it look complex in the beginning but after trying it out for a while it might help you a lot when building colour schemes. A must is to first look at the tutorial and learn how to use this application.

Color scheme Generator 2 is a basic colour wheel generator, quote:

This application generates color schemes of several types. Every scheme is based on one (base) color, which is supplemented with additional colors making together the best optical impression – using one of the authentic algorithms.

The application make you set a base colour then use different schemes as mono, contrast, triad, tetrad and analogic to produce a colour set, the application also have the possibility to change to different variations as pastel, pale, contrast etc. There also a great feature for testing the colour blindness, there are a lot of different variations for testing your colour scheme. You should also see the help for more information about the colour wheel functionality and some common colour theory.

Color schemer v2: Colour schemer is an online colour picker, they also have a more complete colour picker program but that one cost money.

Enter an RGB or HEX value to get a set of matching colors. You can even lighten and darken your scheme or pick colors from a websafe palette!

Defence Mechanism color picker: Is an online flash colour picker can creates a random color and a harmonised colour palette .

Triplecode: A cool 3D colour picker which is based on the The Munsell system.

The Munsell system is different because it is based on how people perceive colors. At its core is a set of data from perceptual studies (done in the late 1930’s) where people were asked to judge the differences in color pairs. The result is a data set which defines a perceptually uniform color space.

Flickr Central Experimental Colr Pickr is a really nice experiment that uses the colour circle together with photos from the Flickr database. You first select a colour from the colour circle, then there are photos from the Flickr popping up according to the colour you selected. If you click the photo you get a larger photo. Please be aware that some pictures are copyrighted.

Explorer color: A flash based colour picker, it is more for making colours tones for your interior but can be nice to play with.

## Other peoples colours

COLOURlovers: A really smart site where people like you and me can add your favourite colours and colour palettes. The site also has an voting system where others can grade your palettes you have made. Also great with a full screen feature for looking at the colours.

//// COLOURlovers:: a place to view, rate and review some lovely colours & palettes. the idea is to create a place of color inspiration where a designer of any sort can see new and lovely colours… find out what colors are hot, what work well in other uses… and simply make some love with colour.

Colorwhore Taken from the tagline, ColorWhore a directory of nice color. The site is just about nice colours that people have submitted to the site, the colours are added to the colour categories red, green, brown etc. Easy way to find colours that just ‘works’.

## Colours and accessibility

Vischeck photoshop plugin you can check your colours for different colour blindness problems.

As you can see from these examples, ‘color blindness’ is really a misnomer- most ‘color blind’ people do in fact see colors!

Web safe colours seen by colour deficient people.

Color vision is interactive way of looking at a palette with some sort of color deficiency.

1 in 12 people have some sort of color deficiency. When you’re designing for the web, this means that 1 in 12 people might not be able to see your site.

Evolt has a new article about accessability and colours.

Even if it looks great at a glance, the color scheme doesn’t work if many visitors can’t easily find crucial information, use whatever services are offered, and effectively navigate the site. This could be up to 1 in 12 people, roughly 8% of the site’s audience.

The colour contrast betweeen foreground and background is an important thing if the user should be able to read your content. Snook has an great tool for testing this. Easy sliders and instant answer if your colour scheme will work. There is similar tools at Juicy studio or a downloadable tool at NILS. You can also read more about colour contrast theory at the Lighhouse.

## Colour theory

Colour, contrast and dimension: An online interactive colour theory tour.

Over at Mezzoblue you can find three good articles about colours, Colour Bland: Value, Colour Bland: Contrast and Colour Schemes.

A designer’s ‘style’ is made up of a number of different factors, though colour plays a large role. Everyone has their own method of coming up with a good colour scheme, which will inevitably affect the results.

Creating colour palettes: An quick quide how to simply build your own palette from two colours.

But when the client only uses one or two colours, I use a favourite technique for creating a whole range of complimentary ‘tones’.

Principles of graphic design with some on colour theory.

Worqx colour theory: A comprehensive resource about colour theory.

Causes of colour is the huge resource when it comes to colour theory and why things are coloured the way it is.

Scholars have learned that all the colors in the universe originate from a mere fifteen fundamental physical causes. These causes appear over and over, lending color to the world around us. Some common causes seem logical — for example, both light bulbs and candles are colored by incandescence — and others are surprising — did you know that the colors of peacock feathers and bubbles are both caused by interference?

The site also have some information about colour blindness, what causes it and different types of the decease.

Note: If you wonder why I spell “color” and “colour” differently is because I did not want to change a name or quote, many of the sites that I found are American, and I try to write en British English. So when I am quoting an American site it is “color” and when I write something it is “colour”, read more about differences between American and British.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2005 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.