Another Cool Color Tool

I love stumbling across useful online tools and gadgets, especially those that make web design chores easier and more enjoyable. Earlier, I blogged about a useful tool for generating intermediate shades of colour.

Staying on this theme, here's one of the sweetest little color generators I have ever seen. Petr Staníček's site, WellStyled.com, contains a Color Scheme Generator that lets you creates color schemes with a single click of the mouse. Click on one of the color swatches arrayed around the onscreen color wheel and this nifty tool will create a four-colour scheme for you.

This is one of the most elegant applications I have seen. Additional features let you select among five types of colour schemes; choose a web-safe palette, if desired; vary the degree of opacity (he uses the term pastel); even view your colour scheme as persons with various types of color vision impairment might see it.

Available color schemes include monochromatic (various tones of the same hue), complementary (two colors diametrically opposite on the colour wheel), analagous (adjacent colours), triads (three equidistant colours), and tetrads (four equidistant colours).

Truly worthy of your favourites list, (though professionals should note that the model used is closer to classic subtractive (pigments-based) color theory than additive (light-based), and that the RGB conversions are approximate).

Another, similar but less full-featured tool recommended by a reader of this blog is Color Schemer Online. It, too, allows you to click on colour swatches and to lighten and darken schemes.

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