The Blog of Will Mayo

4 ways to get more colour into your designs. Because this blog lacks it.

1. Color Schemer Studio

This one is my favorite. Full of tools for every situation, this app practically hands nice colours to you on a plate. Pick a colour and the suggested harmonies can show you which colours go together, with a choice of styles like vibrant or minimalistic.

When you are finished making a theme open up the quick preview to see how your colours look together on a simple web page, saving oodles of time messing around in CSS code to get the right ones.

They also have a boat load of ready made themes available to download on their website.

Give it a go, download the demo for Windows or Mac.

2. Kuler

Hot off the press from Adobe Labs comes Kuler, a neat online Flash application for creating and sharing colours.

Handy for making colours on the fly, or when you don’t want the hassle of installing software. Kuler is integrated nicely with the Adobe suite with the ability to import downloaded themes straight into Photoshop.

3. Photography

The lazy mans colour scheme. Sometimes nature knows better than we do, so bring out last years holiday snaps and start grabbing with the pipette tool. If you are out and about and you see a colour you like in the sky or a flower, take a photo and use it in your next web design.

Photo from http://terje.sorgjerd.no/

Places I like to go for photo inspiration include Stock Xchange, Flickr or any old wallpaper site

4. Widgets

Can’t be bothered to put together your own colours? Get someone else to do it for you, and deliver it free of charge every day to your desktop.

Galleria or Color Burn will inspire you with fresh colours to use however you like, and they even show the hex values to take all the hard work out of being lazy.