WebDev3000 » Colours

Toucan

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:18:38 +0000

If you ever feel down, just think about people who struggle daily with more than you ever had to face your entire life. If that doesn’t help you move on… I honestly don’t what will. Think about colors and the world around you, for example. Ever felt that you’re living in a grey, sad city? Think about people who are color blind! Today, it’s not about making your life better, but about colors, and Toucan can really help you bring a lot of color into your projects…

… and, best of all, we’re talking about a completely free online resource, capable of providing up to 20 colors per palette, offering advanced sharing and importing features, all being done carefully following color theory. It even includes color deficiency previews, and to save your creations, you only need to create a free account. Unfortunately, I didn’t create an account, so I can’t tell you more about the formats available for saving your work, but I am sure you can discover that for yourselves, right?

All you have to do is go to this page and press the yellow Launch Toucan button. Oh, yeah, one more thing – Toucan seems to work properly with all popular browsers, and you will also find a great tutorial movie on the page that I just mentioned, so nobody’s asking you to create an account before seeing what you’ll get. That’s all, folks, enjoy Toucan and be sure to have a colorful day!

ColorSuckr

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:14:33 +0000

Have you ever heard that Flickr has a cousin? For an online service that claims “certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world” without making that statement a shameful lie, it’s no surprise to see that a lot of other Web-based services come with support for it, and now there’s one that even has a name closer to Flickr…

… but there’s more to ColorSuckr than the name and the ability to import Flickr images, believe me! The idea behind this site? You enter the URL of some image (if you enter only a base URL, something like http://www.download3000.com, you will be shown the images on that page and allowed to pick one to use) or simply get one from Flickr, then create color schemes based on those images – no color wheel to play with, nothing to give you a headache. In fact, I am sure that even my grandmother could easily use this one… if she would be familiar with computers, of course! She’s not, so let’s move on, shall we?

Once the image is loaded, a bunch of color schemes are generated, and you can easily go through them and get Hex, Web safe and RGB values of each color, or – even better – simply scroll down a bit and choose to get results as RSS, JSON or XML, as well as to download one Adobe .ACO swatch file.

At last, you should also be aware that ColorSuckr provides a very useful Firefox plugin (also free, of course) that allows you to right click any image inside a site, choose ‘Extract Image Colors’ from the menu, and go right to the ColorSuckr website with the image you selected!

Compatibility: any major browser, as far as I can tell

Color Scheme Designer

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:03:33 +0000

While I was never really talented, I loved drawing classes during school. Now, I really enjoy watching what some designers can come up with, and that’s why I stopped at color theory today. Since web development is really close to art, choosing the right color scheme for a certain site can be pretty tricky without the right tools.

Of course that having a free tool to get the job done properly is the best thing for most of you, and Color Scheme Designer is exactly that tool. After all, usability, aesthetics and graphics are three of the five crucial components of Web design, and you don’t want to take any chances, right?

Released a few months ago, the new version of Color Scheme Designer is third in the history of this Web tool, the previous ones being dated 2005 and 2002. If this last version seems too much, or simply you don’t like the interface, you can go ahead and try Color Scheme Designer 2 or the original release, maybe they can still help you.

Working with Color Scheme Designer is pretty easy: choose to work with a triad, tetrad, and so on (choices are available in the upper left of the page), then spin the color wheel until you’re happy with the result. You can preview your scheme while working on it, as well as getting access to a light web page example and a dark one, links to these pages being located at the bottom of the site, to the right.

Even more than the above, you can even simulate color vision deficiencies, as well as making Color Scheme Designer 3 a part of your own website, allowing your users to pick exactly the color scheme they want to use while browsing it. Anyway, this is a bit more complicated than just “playing” with the online Color Scheme Designer and obtaining a color scheme to use, but it’s well documented, so you shouldn’t have any problems.

At last, the cookie on top of the cake: all that comes with Color Scheme Designer is free to use, no matter if we’re talking about commercial or non-commercial usage!

Compatibility: no problems with Safari (the Windows version), but minor glitches in all other browsers I tried, including Internet Explorer and Google Chrome; I am really curious about your experience with it – be sure to drop a comment below, if you notice any problems with this tool… or even if you don’t!