23 10 2007
colr.org
No, that’s not a typo in the title of this post. colr.org is an online tool I stumbled across yesterday via one of my feeds.
It’s a widely-held view in the design world that if a combination of colours is present in nature it will look good on a web site (or your print collateral, I guess). Your brain thinks that the colours work well together because they’re natural. Simple, but effective.
I’ve been using this technique for a while via the Eyedropper tool in Fireworks (i.e. open a photo, use the eyedropper tool to select colours from it).
colr.org simplifies things by extracting a set of colours from the photo for you.
When you load the site a random image from Flickr is displayed top right (you can ignore this and ask for a different Flickr image, or load your own photo, btw). Mouse over the image and a whole bunch of little squares of colour appear. Click one of the squares and the hex value is displayed for you. You can start a new scheme and save a series of colours via the Edit Scheme box.
Handy!