Friday Tool Tip – Colour Me In

When you were 3 it didn’t really matter what colours you used to express yourself. Your parents would dutifully take your latest art work and put it on the fridge, wall or noticeboard.

Times have changed though and your clients and marketplace may not be quite as accepting of your love of mixing blue, green and purple together as your parents once were. Colour conveys so many things and for small business owners it can convey how we want our business to be taken. Whether you like it or not colour is a very personal thing and a point of judgement. So whether you feel on top of colour selection, and just need some inspiration, or if you really have no idea what goes with your corporate navy blue, then there are some outstanding colour scheme tools available online.

Here are 2 of the best that I have come across :

Kuler by Adobe – http://kuler.adobe.com
It provides loads of inspiration from other clever creatives and also allows you to create your own colour schemes. Once you are signed in (joining is free) you get details on the colours in a variety of formats including RGB, CMYK and Hex as well as the ability to download the scheme/swatch (Adobe Swatch Exchange format).

ColorBlender (Kim Jensen) – http://colorblender.com
This tool allows you to load a random blend or create one yourself by specifying the base colour or your design in RGB format. It will then present you with a blend based on your base colour and also provide you with details of those colours in hex format (used in html design). You can even save a colour blend with having to sign-up or log-in to anything.

Here are a couple of other recommendations that I have come across but haven’t tried yet myself.

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html
http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend

Enjoy colouring!

BTW – I am sure that my Mum had a kitchen in the 70’s that looked the same as the colour swatch at the top