Color Scheme Designer is a free online application for quickly and easily producing harmonious color schemes. Color Scheme Designer offers several intuitive tools that allow you to produce color schemes based on one, two, three or four base colors. This should result in a palette that will give plenty of options for producing an effective color scheme for print or web use.
Highlights of Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer is an easy to use online application that invites experimentation.
- Free to use and no registration required
- Select from several color spaces, including RGB and Pantone
- Produce color schemes based on different color theories
- Randomize option to quickly cycle through different random color schemes
- See how a color scheme will be perceived by those with color blindness
- Export a color scheme in several formats including text and Photoshop and GIMP palettes
Why Use Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer is a powerful and useful tool for all levels of graphics software users. Whether you're a professional graphic or web designer, or a home user who enjoys digital scrapbooking or other digital crafts, you should benefit from a tool like this to help produce successful and harmonious color schemes.
It is especially useful for helping you to break out of any color ruts that you may find yourself in and possibly get you working with a wider and more adventurous range of color schemes.
The ability to export color palettes once you have found a scheme that you wish to work with makes it very easy to fit this step into your workflow. There are several options for exporting including a basic text list, but you can also use the export feature to produce ACO and GPL palettes that can be imported into Photoshop and GIMP respectively.
The addition of a feature that displays how colors will appear to various color blindness sufferers should be a very useful tool for designers concerned with producing web or print materials to ensure that their message is accessible by as wide an audience as possible.
Limitations of Color Scheme Designer
This is a pretty focused application designed to do a single job and as such there are few real limitations. In fact its feature set is probably more extensive than one might reasonably expect.
Print designers may complain at the lack of a CMYK color space option in the interface, but with the export saving color values in Hex, as well as RGB formats, any software being used to produce print work should automatically make a relatively accurate conversion.
At the time of writing, Color Scheme Designer is offered solely as an online application, so this may be inconvenient at times for some users. The producer of the application, Petr Stanicek, has plans for a downloadable version, as well as a public API to allow it to be easily integrated into other web sites. This should make this powerful tool even more flexible.
Help and Support
The user interface is so well laid out and intuitive, there really is little need for help and accordingly there is little available. However in the Help menu, there is a Show Tooltips option and when this is turned on, you are offered contextual information on all aspects of the interface when you mouse over them. This is an extremely effective way to deliver information to users and makes the process of using Color Scheme Designer even easier.
You can try out this free application at the Color Scheme Designer website.