My not-so-secret weapons for choosing great colors

It’s estimated that the human eye can distinguish around 10 million different colors.

So when asked to design a logo, brochure or website that incorporates the color green, exactly where should you begin? Start sifting though a couple of hundred-thousand shades until you find one you like?

And what about creating color palettes? With an infinite number of color combinations at your disposable, creating color schemes can quickly become a daunting task.

But never fear. Here are two of my favourite free, online tools to make your life easier when it comes to colors and color schemes.

flatuicolors.com

This seemingly simple webpage is so incredibly helpful as a starting point for choosing a color. Whether it’s to create a simple logo, a highlight color against neutral text, or a background color on a website, flatuicolors.com supplies 20 contemporary, vibrant colors. And when you find the one you like, click on it and the color’s code is instantly saved to your clipboard! Then it’s just a case of copy > paste into whatever graphics program you’re using and voila! You have color. Need two contrasting colors for a logo you’re putting together? You might just find what you need on flatuicolors.com.

Adobe Kuler

I use Adobe Kuler almost on a daily basis. Creating color schemes for documents and designs used to be a time-consuming and painstaking task, but not anymore! Adobe Kuler creates a range of color themes, either from a single base color, or by creating a color theme based on an image.

To get the full benefits of Adobe Kuler, you’ll need an Adobe ID, but even if you’re not using Adobe software, you can still enjoy this fabulous free service from Adobe.

Creating a theme from a single color

Start exploring by dragging your curser around the color wheel, and see your themes magically appear appear, built from your chosen base color. If you already know the RGB or Hexadecimal values for your base color, type them in at the bottom of the screen and your theme will be created for you. Don’t like what you see? Take a look at the other 7 themes created for you, each based on a different theory of color matching. If you’re using Adobe Creative Suite, you can save your template and access it from your Library in any Adobe program, but even if you’re not using Creative Suite, you can simply copy the RGB or Hex values from below the color theme and use them in whichever graphics program you’re using.

Creating a theme from an image

If you already have an image chosen for a brochure, slide, website or graphic, import it into Adobe Kuler to see five different themes created just for you. Again, if you have an Adobe ID, you can save the theme and access it from your Creative Cloud Library, otherwise click the color wheel icon to take you back to the original screen where you can retrieve the RGB and Hex values for each color in your own, personalised, custom-made color theme.

There’s no longer any excuse for mismatched or ugly color! Flatuicolor.com and Adobe Kuler do all the hard work for you, freeing us all up to get on with ministry instead of getting hung up on color selection.

We’d love to see examples of your own designs that have been created using either of these great tools!