Picking the right colors for a project can be hard. Sometimes you end up doing the same scale over and over again, overusing those easy blue and white with a touch of gray designs. So what do you do when you need inspiration for new color schemes? You could hunt the CSS galleries of course, looking at designs, but there are better ways.

Enter the huge amount of color schemers available online!

The First Stops

A great first stop when looking for new inspiration when it comes to colors, is COLOURlovers. It’s basically a blog about colors, with trends and votable palettes, and so on. This is where I would go first, if inspiration failed me. I just might for an upcoming project, actually…

Almost as cool is Adobe’s online service Kuler. It sports a way better design, tag clouds, and 24 508 color palettes to work from. There’s also a desktop application, using the AIR framework, if you want Kuler easily available. This is so much more than just a place to hunt for colors, developers can use the Kuler API and do a bunch of stuff, but for me and for now, it’s just a great place to scan for interesting color patterns.

Online Apps to the Rescue

Color Inspirator and ColorToy are two nice services. Both offer random color combinations, if you’re really thirsty for something new this might be the way to go. More fun than practical, perhaps, since you usually have an idea of what you’re after, but still. Fun stuff, and could be useful. It would be interesting to create a design, basing all the color choices on the randomness of online apps like these.

There are some other services as well. Color Palette Generator lets you upload an image, and it’ll generate a color palette based on it for you. Pretty cool, and could even be handy if you’ve got a header image you really want to use, but aren’t sure what colors the site you’re doing should have. Color Combinations lets you pull other websites colors, as well as offers lots of palettes arranged in color tags. Finally, GrayBit is a really cool service that lets you test the contrast of your chosen colors. Put in http://www.devlounge.net in their little form, press the Make it Gray button and BAM! There it is, acceptable contrast I’d say.

Closing the Coloring Book

There’s ton more, of course, but hopefully this little article will help you out the next time your creative mind draws a blank when you need to choose the right colors. It sure reminded me, just by browsing these sites again, of how many cool color combinations there is out there.

Happy coloring!