When it comes to online color palette and color scheme generators, the choice can be hard, as there are many tools out there that offer such functionality. At one point, I was tempted to list the 50+ generators that I know about, but then thought, this isn’t about making another "ultimate" list, what matters most are the tools that offer the functionalities required to unleash your creative juices.

Color is the most significant factor that affects our mood and perception of any visual element, and making the right choice of a color combination is considered a priority, regardless where it will be used. This roundup is about the online tools that will help you accomplish that, 15 to be exact, packed with features to make the process of generating color palettes, schemes, and themes a smooth, pleasant, and creative experience.

Related Roundups

• 15 Online Background Generators
• 5 Free Online Twitter Background Generators

Helpful Resources

• Color scheme – From Wikipedia
• List of colors – From Wikipedia
• HTML Color Names – From w3schools
• Color blindness – From Wikipedia
• Color Vision – A color deficiency simulator
• Online Color blind Selftest – From Tjshome
• Tools to check accessibility issues – From etre

Know Some More?

You know the drill; share them with everyone by adding them in the comments.

ColoRotate.org is a new innovative tool to explore colors in 3D, just as a human brain perceives color. There are plenty of tools to help create and explore color palettes, and many of them are excellent in what they provide, but remain constrained by their two-dimensional display and selection of colors. It’s true, we did adapt to the limitations of prior tools, but now is the time for revolution, and ColoRotate delivers that with grace.

The process of selecting and exploring colors is simplistic enough, and is grasped by the user at a glance. The tool clearly displays the multidimensional nature of the selected color and how colors are related to each other, just the way our eyes and brain process color. ColoRotate comes packed with features that make the creation of color palettes and themes a snap for both experts and amateurs, and just like other tools, a community is there, to share and explore.

ColoRotate was realized by Michael Douma, the executive director of the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA), who describes the tool as follows:

ColoRotate mimics the way the human mind senses and processes color, making it an extremely useful tool that also happens to be engaging and fun.

Adobe Kuler is a web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

Colorspire is a cool tool that helps you select a color scheme for a website project. The tool has a flexible color picker and color wheel, that can be used to find analogous colors, complementary colors, triad or tertiary colors that will match your base color. The results are immediately displayed on a webpage layout, which could be used as a preview of how the webpage would look.

Color Scheme Designer is the latest version, precisely version 3, from the creator of Color schemes generator. The new version has a brand new interface, as well as the engine, all rewritten from the scratch. Rapidly increased precision and color space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme.

Why color schemes are Important? The question is answered by the developer as follows:

While designing web pages, computer applications, or house interiors, we need to find good color scheme – set of colors producing the best impression. For every tint there are colors which it can coexist with, and which it can’t. Some combinations are uncomfortable, or disturbing – while others are pleasant.

Experienced designers choose colors intuitively, many people can smell which colors go together well and which don’t. However, finding the good combination of colors may be sometimes long and gruelling work. The color theory makes the work easier. This tool will find set of colors you can start with, and it may facilitate your looking for the optimal color palette.

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.

4096 color wheel is an easy tool, just hover over the wheel to view colors and select .

Our color schemes site provides the color code, such as #f0f0f0, which you can use in your web design or graphic design projects which involve color. Choosing the right colors to use on your web site has never been easier! You can take the color codes and use the color schemes right in programs like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, or Frontpage, or even directly in HTML code. We also provide the convenient color names beside each color. If you are choosing interior paint colors to use in your home, this site can also give you great color ideas.

Generate matching color schemes like never before!

ColorJack: Sphere (Color Theory Visualizer)

Free online tool for color palette design and matching.