Easily Create and Share Color Palettes

April 11th, 2010

Working with your designer to create a color scheme for your web site can often be a tricky thing.

On the one hand, many designers are wary of being reduced to mere “pixel pushers.” But, in some cases, it’s helpful to provide your designer with the exact color scheme you were hoping for on your site. Of course, your designer may come back to you with their own feedback, but I do think that being very specific can make for an effective and unambiguous starting point at the very least.

I’ve researched many of the online tools for easily arriving at an ideal color palette, and of all the ones I’ve tried, the “Create a Palette” page at ColourLovers.com is my favorite to date.

Within a couple of minutes, it’s possible for a non-technical person to create, and then share a color scheme in a simple format that would be easy for any designer to implement.

Here’s how it’s done (in a nutshell):

Go to http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/add.
If it’s your first time at the site, you’ll need to create an account (it’s free) using the “Sign In” button at the upper-right-hand side of the screen.
Add up to 5 colors using the simple point-and-click interface (see the video below for more details on how to do this).
Fill in the ‘Palette Name’ field below the color picker section of the page.
Fill out any other fields you’d like to fill out (the rest are optional).
Click the ‘Create Palette’ button.
Since chances are that at least some of the colors you’ve chosen are new to ColourLovers.com’s existing database, you’ll be prompted by an alert window asking you to name your colors.
Create names for the brand new colors you’ve created.
Click the ‘Create Palette’ button.
You will now be taken to the brand-new page for your color palette on ColourLovers.com.
Copy the URL of this page and bookmark it, or simply email it to whomever needs to see it.