How to Choose a Color Palette for Your Website

I love color. Love it! I launched my first website back in 1999, and since then I’ve worked on more websites than I can remember. I tend to update sites every couple of years, so there have been many. I love working with web developers to create a new website or to update an existing site. And I love adding to sites once they’ve been launched, setting up new pages as needed.

However, I especially love working with a developer on a new site: determining the overall look and feel and choosing the color palette. I know this can be tricky for people who are just getting started with their new website. There are a couple of tools that I love playing around with and that have helped me figure out the color palette for my branding and websites. Here are my two favorites:

1. Design Seeds. Browse through this site for inspiration based on photographs. The creator of the page pulls six different colors from each photograph, and if you hover over each one, you’ll see the hex code. You can pass that onto your graphic designer when you’re ready to create your new website. You can also search for color palettes based on the RGB color or on the theme, including: Autumn, Edible, and Flora. My inspiration for the Tribal Publishing colors came from Design Seeds.
2. Kuler. This is an Adobe tool where you can try out, create, and save various color schemes. You can either upload an image (think Design Seeds) and then pull colors from there. Or you can start with a color and go from there. Select from six different “rules” such as: Analagous (match colors from adjacent hues), Triad (where your colors are spaced around the wheel for a contrasting result), and Complementary (where you choose two opposing colors which form the base of your palette).

There are a lot of other options out there, like Palettebuilder.com and ColorSchemeDesigner.com, but they’re all pretty similar to Kuler.

How have you chosen your branding or website colors in the past?

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