User Experience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
My background is in web development, not UI design. I have no problem creating the layout and getting it pixel-perfect, but I can never figure out what colors to use and where. I have seen projects like Adobe's Kuler, but even then I don't know where to apply the colors in the design. Which is a good background color? font color? accent color?
Where do you get your color combinations and how do you decide how to use them?
I use http://colorschemedesigner.com/.
Hope this helps!
ColourLovers.com is a great tool for this purpose and related.
I've used ColorMatch in the past. You pick a colour you like and it will give you a six colour palette of complimentary colours based on the one you chose.
It is very lightweight, and because it is all done in html/javascript, can be saved to your disk for use when offline.
As I posted in Choosing a set of colors, Kuler is an app by Adobe focused on creating and sharing color schemes. You can search for schemes by tag.
www.colorhunter.com builds color palettes based on images. You can upload an image or point it to a url and it will help you pick colors.
Also here is a site I built a few weeks ago. It is still in serious alpha but it lets you pick colors for various elements on a page and see them in live.
I would love any feed back you have about that. (remember alpha)
I have used Agave occasionally for finding color combinations.
About "where to use them", I guess you need to experiment somewhat...?
You may find some of the links under http://www.delicious.com/adrianh/colour of interest. It's a mix of tools and articles.
For me this is the best: http://kuler.adobe.com
http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard.asp
It lets you pick a color as a starting point (or even randomize it) and then it gives you the supplemental colors with several different schemes (triadic, tetradic, complimentary, etc.)
