Web Designers and casual theme editors (those who just change colors and some layout parameters) are always in need of a great Color Combination. A good color combination stands out, look good on the eyes, shows a sense of professionalism and increase the value of the design.
The problem is landing to a great color combination is a tough task. Either you can just look at the palette and decide this color combination looks good or you already have a predefined combination in your mind. However there are some tools which let you various color blends to choose from. I would be reviewing one such web service in this post.
Color Blender is a free service which helps create various color combination and mashups. The main feature of it is, that you can choose a base color and it can provide you with additional five blends. Just provide one color called the base color and it will give you 5 additional colors to form a color scheme ready to be used on your website and designs. There are two modes:
- Auto Match
- Direct Edit
In Automode, you just specify a single color, and it uses its algorithm to create a variation of scheme with 5 extra colors. Alternatively you can use the Direct Edit mode to manually change individual colors.
Just below that you have RGB slider options to varied the colors to your liking, along with a 7 color palette to choose little variations from the present color scheme.
Finally, you are ready to share/download the color schemes
- You can download as Photoshop Color Table, Illustrator Colors or simply forward as email
- Save a blend online and load it later for reference. You can also load your saved blends later
Personal Impression:
Its a great tool. Clearly a mature product. The auto color selection give some very good result provided you pick a good base color of your choice. Incase you are bored with selecting your colors it also provides you with a lost of popular color blends to choose from.
Being a web-designer, I always feel lost of color combination as I need almost a new one for every other project. Hence a service like this really helps. The send to email is a nice little addon which might be helpful to suggest colors to your clients. Overall I would give it a thumbs UP.
Links:
Popular Color Blends: http://www.colorblender.com/browse.asp
Choose a Random Color Blend: http://www.colorblender.com/?preloadrandom=yes
Share blend between multiple workstations: http://www.colorblender.com/cookiecopy.asp
