7 Great Web Design Color Tools for 2015

With a plethora of color tools being released each year, it can be difficult for graphic designers to keep up with them all, much less separate the quality tools from the subpar ones. We’ve recapped seven recent and worthwhile color tools below, all of which offer their own unique features to help designers identify perfect color schemes and other aesthetically pleasing touches.

1. Coolors

Simple and effective, Coolors is a color scheme generator that is accessible via your web browser. After clicking on “Generator” on top of the page, one can generate color schemes by tapping the spacebar, typing in specific colors, adjusting color components and exporting your palettes. What’s also very cool is the Coolors Browser, where you can see user submitted schemes to help provide inspiration for your next idea. Coolors is one of several color scheme tools to use in your quest to create the perfect color scheme.

2. Material Palette

With this inventive site, designers can work off two selected colors to get an entire palette in visual form. Material Palette is a great way to test out potential color schemes for web design or logos, specifically how specific colors may look alongside each other. This color palette generator is an extremely easy-to-use way to verify certain color ideas work.

3. Flat UI Colors

If your website is one of many riding the wave of flat web design, then the Flat UI Colors tool can work wonders for its aesthetic pleasantness. The tool presents a nice curated collection of colors with the ability to copy the colors to your clipboard with a single click, a very useful function for designers who have to swap in and out color codes. This is yet another great tool for both finding inspiration and verifying color ideas look cohesive.

4. What Colour Is It?

While this site does not have as much actual value to developers as the others on this list, What Colour Is It? is still a nice source for inspiration, as it alternates HEX code colors one second at a time with visual appeal. It bases the displayed color on the actual, 24-hour time (17:07:50, for instance, is the color #170750), so you can be certain the color will never repeat in a single day.

5. Trianglify

Trianglify is a savvy tool if you’re looking create striking polygonal images or backgrounds. This triangle art generator produces its work by allowing users to customize variance, or amount of randomness used when generating the pattern. You can also customize cell size, or level of granularity of the pattern, in addition to several provided Trianglify palettes. The tool, written by Quinn Rohlf, is one of the elite resources online for polygonal generation.

6. Kubist

One of the other premiere tools for polygonal generation is Kubist, a striking invention that allows you to upload any photo and transform it into polygonal art. Examples of a landscape, Mao Zedong and a dance show users what they’re getting into. The tool provides customization for style (triangle or cell) in addition to gradient allowance, number of points, circle size and border size. This is a high-powered and highly customizable tool for any seeker of polygonal generation.

7. Gradify

Gradify is a “module which finds the most prominent colors in any image, and produces a scalable, responsive CSS gradient.” This provides a more visually appealing response for websites whose code and HTTP objects leave a timeframe where images appear incomplete. Gradify instead creates an appropriate gradient for that loading file as a placeholder image, resulting in a more visually appealing result.

The seven apps above are fantastic tools that designers can use to find inspiration, double check whether ideas flow properly, or both. Better yet, they are all lightweight and can be accessed via your web browser.

Got another color tool to share? I’d love to hear about it! Share your favorite color tools for web design in the comments!