Color is one of the essential elements in design. It creates mood, evokes emotion, communicates a message, and ultimately sells. Choosing the right color scheme is critical to any design project. Fortunately, there are numerous color tools for designers available, and most of them are free to use. In this article, we’ll explore some of the tools that can help you choose and combine colors.
In addition to choosing the right color scheme, it’s important to find the right images that fit your design. That’s where our article on image search tools comes in. And if you’re looking for ways to streamline your image creation and editing workflow, check out our article on AI tools that can not only save you time, but also help you accomplish more complex tasks that would otherwise require advanced design skills.
1. Colormind
Colormind is an AI-powered color palette generator. The tool uses deep learning algorithms that have been trained on popular user interfaces by extracting and analyzing background, text, branding, and colors. Colormind helps you to create unique color palettes that are both beautiful and functional, and instantly apply them to a demo landing page.
You can also upload an image, and Colormind will create a custom color palette for you. The generated palettes come with HEX code, making it easy to implement them into your design.
Pricing. Colormind offers a free version that allows you to generate color palettes. The API is also free for personal and non-commercial use.
2. Colormatcher by Designs.AI
Designs.AI is an AI-powered software suite for logos, banners, mockups, colors, and copies.
One of the tools is Colormatcher, which works with color in many ways. For example, it creates millions of color palettes and combinations to bring your ideas for your products based on the main color or theme. It also harmonizes color schemes using a color wheel based on the principle of color theory. You can also create a palette based on your own image or apply different overlays. Using mathematical calculations, the algorithm evaluates text-to-background contrasts and shows you which combinations will make your words stand out and be readable.
The tool provides RGB, HSV, and CMYK codes for each color in the palette. As the icing on the cake, it offers a library of colors with names and meanings, along with appropriate combinations, to help you to approach to color schemes more consciously.
Pricing. You can use Colormatcher for free, while full access to the creative suite starts at $29 per month.
3. Huemint
Huemint is a color tool that helps designers create harmonious color schemes for brand identities, websites, bootstraps, or gradients, and apply them in the context you need.
To build a machine-learning algorithm, engineer Jack Qiao collected 1.2 million images of graphic designs from the web, and then plotted a subset of those designs in CIE Lab Space. He created a 3D visualization, in which each point is an instance of the color used. Based on this dataset, he implemented three models with different approaches to color schemes — a non-ML algorithm, a Transformer, and a Diffusion Model. With Huemint, you can play around with any of them to generate multiple choices of color palettes.
Pricing. Free.
Bonus: Based on the dataset, Jack Qiao not only made observations about colors that are typically used for web design, but also noticed a bunch of them in the “low-probability areas”. These are the colors that are not commonly chosen by designers. To demonstrate them, he built Poolors — a tool that offers you combinations that are least used by designers.
4. Adobe Color
Adobe Color is a color suite that provides designers with a range of color tools, including the ability to create, save and share color palettes. The software allows users to create color schemes based on color theory principles or by uploading an image and extracting the colors from it. It also offers an online community where designers can explore color themes created by other designers, browse libraries and save their favorite color schemes.
Pricing. Free.
5. Coolors
Coolors is a popular color software suite with over 4 million users. It enables designers to browse thousands of trending color schemes or quickly create their own unique color combination, as well as to extract colors from uploaded images. You can also keep the color you want and see the program’s suggestions for the next ones, then adjust the hues or switch between the close shades. Coolors supports exporting a scheme in different formats and allows you to continue working in the dashboard, where you can save and organize palettes or create fantastic collages by adding a context to your palettes. What’s more, Coolors lets you explore how your color scheme will be seen by people with different color blindness conditions, including protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, and others.
Pricing. Coolors offers a free version, while you can upgrade your account to the a Pro version, which enables you to remove ads, create palettes with more than 5 colors, save unlimited palettes and more. The price is $5 per month.
6. Color Palette Generator by Canva
Canva is a popular graphic design tool that also has a Color Palette Generator. It allows you to upload an image, and the system will analyze it and generate a color palette that you can use in your design projects. While you can’t to customize the palette extracted from your image, the tool enables you to create a custom color palette by yourself.
In addition, Canva offers you to browse through thousands of curated color palette combinations or search for the one you need by typing in color, theme or any other keyword.
Pricing. Free.
7. Art Palette by Google
Art Palette is an experimental tool from Google Art and Culture that helps artists and designers to find color palettes that complement artwork or photographs. Google’s engineers analyzed thousands of artworks to calculate their palettes. Based on the colors found in an uploaded image, the tool suggests a color scheme and shows how the colors play out in other works of art. While Art Palette is not a direct tool for web designers, there are still ways they can use it in their work such as finding inspiration for color combinations based on best-in-class artworks.
Pricing. Free.
8. Khroma
Khroma is an AI-powered color tool that suggests colors and color combinations based on your preferences. Start by selecting a set of 50 colors that you like the most, and the algorithm will use this data to train the algorithm to suggest colors that match your taste.
This tool allows you to choose over thousands of personalized color combinations and pick different templates to view your pairings. You can also use the search by typing in a word or phrase that describes the style you’re going for, and save your favorite options for future use.
Pricing. Free.
9. Eva Design System
Eva Design System is a deep learning color generator. You can choose the primary color for your scheme, and the algorithm will provide you with the rest of a palette harmonized to your choice. The program provides HEX code for each color in the palette and supports export to various formats.
Pricing. Free.
10. Eggradients
Eggradients is a curated collection of gradients and a library of hues that you can use in your design projects. This tool features a huge repository of gradients along with HEX codes, as well as a library of hues with a quick description of what the color means, how it can be used in different areas, and which colors work best together.
Pricing. Free.
11. Muzli Colors
Muzli Colors is a color tool developed by Muz.li, a design inspiration platform. It allows you to create a unique color scheme for your design projects. You can choose an initial color and get a set of combinations with it in mind, or manually create your own scheme while previewing the result in a live UI demo.
Pricing. Free.
12. Colorable
Colorable is a tool that helps designers to create accessible text and background color combinations for their websites or apps. The tool checks the contrast between text and background and suggests color combinations that meet accessibility standards. Users can choose from several color palettes and adjust the settings to create custom combinations. Colorable provides a simulation of how color combinations will appear to people, which can help designers ensure that their color schemes are still legible and distinguishable to users.
Pricing. Free.
13.Picular
Picular is a color search engine. Users can enter a keyword or a phrase, and the tool will suggest colors that match the query. Picular also provides the HEX codes for the colors, making it easy to implement them into a design, and shows an image reference for each of the colors in the search results.
Pricing. Free.
14. Color Space
Color Space is a color tool that provides a range of color schemes and combinations. Users can enter a HEX code, and the system will offer them to choose between different combinations or generate a gradient of two or three colors. The tool also allows users to generate CSS code for their color schemes, making it easy to implement them into a design.
Pricing. Free.
That’s it for our roundup of the best color tools for designers! With these tools, you can easily create beautiful color schemes and find the perfect colors for your design projects.