Color Tool Gets Major Update

Theresa Stone

Version 1 of Petr Stanicek’s free, Web-based palette generator Color Scheme Designer debuted way back in 2002. Now at version 3, it has matured into a tool that’s attractive with lots of features, yet fun to use.
You have your choice of monochromatic, complimentary, triad, tetrad, analogic, and accented analogic color palettes. You can tweak those palettes by dragging circles around a color wheel. You can also change the saturation, brightness, and contrast. To get a sense of how people with vision disorders see your color choices, simply choose from a drop-down list.
Once you decide on a palette, you can export it in formats that work in Adobe apps and HTML+CSS, XML, TXT, and GPL.
But my favorite feature is the ability to apply the colors you’re considering to a dummy Web page. You can choose whether darker or lighter colors in the palette predominate.
I generated this palette:

And applied it to a Web site template with dummy text and images: