One of the hardest chores for me in newspaper web site design is to pick colors that are compatible, especially within the same basic hue. Good color choices are important for great newspaper design.
Here are four tools I have found most helpful in choosing optimum colors.
1. ColorBlender is a terrific web site that not only gives you various shades and tints of the same hue, it also gives you a color palette to choose from as you design the site. This is most helpful for the colorblind and the otherwise color challenged among us. Most of you are men: look at the way you dress! http://colorblender.com
2. The second is a color palette creator at SlayerOffice.com. This is especially useful when you are sticking to variations within one hue. It shows you nine colors (along with the starting color of your choice or a random color) with various levels of opacity over a white background and a black background. You also can change the background colors. http://slayeroffice.com/tools/color_palette/
3. The third is a “dynamic: color sector in that it has mouseover control for the background, and you can select colors for the text and for the sample’s border. It also gives you a list of all the named HTML colors that also change dynamically with a mouseover. It’s pretty cool. http://mytexttools.com/HTML-Color-Picker.html
4. The fourth is a little program called ColorCop that also gives you various shades of the same color. It also allows you to sample a color from a web page with its eyedropper tool.
What is handy about this one is that as a program it is set to be permanently in front of whatever else you have open on your desktop. So as you are designing your web page, the small window (actual size shown) is always visible. This is really helpful when trying to see how different colors look on your page. It is a good way to achieve the best newspaper design possible. http://colorcop.net
What are your most useful color selection tools?
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