When you have to start a new web project from scratch and you get absolutely no indication from the client as to what colors he/she would like on their site, or if they have just one base color to start with, where do you turn to? Color scheme generators? No? Sure?

Anyway, here’s a short list of my favorite color tools for the web:

1. My main and favorite one: ColorMatch Redux, is a very simple web-based color theme generator. Just paste a hex color value in the “Hex” field and click “Use it”. ColorMatch will give you 8 swatches of colors that are matching the base one you specified. You can then use the three RGB sliders to tweak the scheme until you get the right one. ColorMatch can then export to .ACT, .AI or Plain text files.
2. Adobe’s Kuler, a recently launched web-based (flash-based) theme generator (offline version available by installing Adobe’s AIR), allows you to view, create, search, tag color themes, and even subscribe to feeds for the highest-rated, popular or newest feeds by other users. Really nice. Now if only I could change the website background to preview the themes against a different color than black. Or maybe I’m being picky.
3. And finally, Yafla, pretty similar to ColorMatch but also includes saturation and lighting control, conversion to HSV, and 10 color pickers to save colors while you work, at the bottom of the page.

Oh, and if you’re still addicted to color names, check out “Name that Color“. Just paste the hex code of any color and it will give you the name of that color (or name of the closest equivalent color).

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