Paletton – Color Scheme Designer

http://www.paletton.com

141 26 12 years ago

Alupis• 12 years ago

I, being a color-deaf programmer, have used this and their previous version (which is very very good) extensively when doing anything graphical.

I highly recommend the service.

antjanus• 12 years ago

I was about to comment on how it looks just like Color Scheme Designer and when I went to the site I was redirected to paletton, I'm very happy to see this project alive again! =D

bellerocky• 12 years ago

I don't see that site redirect[1]. I have the Color Schemer Studio app installed on my Mac, I hope they update it with some of these new ideas. I use this app all the time.

[1] http://www.colorschemer.com/

theandrewbailey• 12 years ago

That appears to be something different, and I am not aware of Color Scheme Designer having an app. The redirect is at http://colorschemedesigner.com/

moron4hire• 12 years ago

I've had this in my bookmarks as "Color Scheme Designer 3" for at least a year. It's a great tool, if you know how and when to use it. But if you use the "Examples" tab to see what the colors would look like on a page, you'll see just how "stock template" tweaking nothing but colors can look. Use sparingly, use for ideas, don't use it as gospel.

thisjepisje• 12 years ago

Reminds me of Adobe's Kuler: https://kuler.adobe.com

jimhefferon• 12 years ago

Gee, I thought the opposite. This kind of site is interesting-- thank you to the folks who put it up-- but perhaps it is formulaic. In any event, as a non-color person I can never seem to get something that strikes me as quite good. Nothing bad, maybe, but nothing too good. It obviously could just be me but .. I'm all that I've got.

Whereas at Kuler I easily find schemes that were contributed by folks who are color folks and that hit my eye as really quite good. Maybe it'll be something called "Summer Raspberries" and darn it, it looks just like that, very summery, and just what I am looking for. (And often the schemes don't fit into a formula, that I can see.)

eriktrautman• 12 years ago

I, too, really enjoy using this tool to design color schemes. As a frequent user (who's probably not using it correctly), two minor suggestions to improve the experience:

1. I wish the "Base RGB" entry field was bigger or more emphasized because I still find myself poking around the page for a bit looking for it after a long absence from the site. My primary use case is grabbing a pixel color of something I like on the web with my Color Picker add-on and trying to see if it becomes a useful scheme. 2. I also wish there was a sort of "click to add the hex code to your keyboard" in the scheme viewer... I don't like having to hover to get the title and then manually typing it.

It's a great site (I use it in my lesson on color as well[1]), many thanks for putting it together!

[1] http://www.vikingcodeschool.com/web-design-basics/understand...

artursapek• 12 years ago

The shareable URL has a bug - when I re-open the same URL I've generated the top-right and bottom-left colors are swapped.

allochthon• 12 years ago

I don't do anything in graphics, so maybe the UI is fairly standard or at least recognizable to someone in that field, but it struck me as being different and interesting.

nnx• 12 years ago

Maybe it is because I'm trying it from an iPad, but the UI seems quite cluttered and behaves quite surprisingly/erratically.

I guess http://colourco.de will maintain its top priority in my bookmark list for experimenting with color palettes.

wuliwong• 12 years ago

Funny, I was just looking at this the other day. The process seems to have a bit more options than some other sites I've used. I'm no designer, and when it comes to color palette, I'm looking for some clear, opinionated suggestions. But maybe this site is more appealing to designers than something like kuler?

adambratt• 12 years ago

I wonder why they got rid of the original version of this: http://www.colorschemedesigner.com

It had a similar design but was much more useable in my opinion.

kevinmrose• 12 years ago

Better URL too IMO.

mkehrt2• 12 years ago

What color space does this use? Is it HSV? You should consider moving to something more perceptually based; all these look slightly off to me.

jarek-foksa• 12 years ago

What color space would be better than HSV? HSV- and HSL-based color pickers are intuitive, predictable and used by the majority of the designer-oriented apps: https://community.kde.org/Krita/Community_Mockups_and_Wishli...

boronine• 12 years ago

I created HUSL as an alternative to HSL, particularly for programmatic palette generation.

http://www.boronine.com/husl/

brute• 12 years ago

HUSL was already mentioned, so I bring up HSP [1]. The idea is to adjust the lightness (the L in HSL) by something which is closer to the percieved luminescence.

Also I wonder if HSL will ever manage to replace HSB/HSV as the default choice for color pickers.

[1] http://alienryderflex.com/hsp.html

mkehrt2• 12 years ago

CIE-LAB, or anything that is based on how humans see, rather than the phosphors in old CRTs. HSV/L are just a simple linear transformation of RGB, which corresponds to the phosphors available to produce CRTs, not the vision properties of the human eye. HSV/L was a good approximation when computers were too slow to do the transformations, but it's an appallingly bad space for doing automated color palette generation.

For example, note how the hue dimension of HSV ( http://krazatchu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/hsv-rgb.jpg ) has weird nonlinearities (green is much, much wider than yellow, for example) compared to the Munsell color space ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/MunsellCo... ) which was experimentally derived from experiments on humans.

HSV is ok for color pickers where a human is picking a color, but it makes no sense when you are picking the H angle and generating color based on it, because a constant H angle delta does not correspond to a constant change in human perception at different base angles. In other words, if you have a base color at some X degress of H, and two accent colors at X+30 and X-30, you won't perceive the two accents as being the same distance from the base, X, because different H angles are perceived as different color distances at different points in the spectrum. The transformation from H to perception space is not linear.

And that's just hue. L, S, and V (pick two!) have their own issues, with different hues being perceived as different lightness or saturation at the same L or S value.

(Sorry for a late reply)

jjgreen• 12 years ago

Warning, this site uses addthis, the canvas cookie js malware.

lfuller• 12 years ago

Spyware, not malware. Unless they are somehow attempting to take over control of your computer or perform some other crime.

peaton• 12 years ago

For those of you who confused like I was, this site/app used to be Color Scheme Designer 3 [1]. Same people, new name apparently.

[1] http://colorschemedesigner.com/csd-3.5/

gordjw• 12 years ago

Really like it, love the vision simulation too.

One small suggestion to improve: having an option to see all of the vision simulations at once would be incredibly useful.

civilian• 12 years ago

A buddy and I made a similar tool that let you test palettes on a few mock website layouts: http://palettecomp.com/ Hope someone finds it useful!

splitbrain• 12 years ago

this is cool. Would be nice to have a way to pick palettes directly at your site instead of going to colorlovers. Maybe by searching?

totoe• 12 years ago

nice new update on the Scheme generator.

Paletton – Color Scheme Designer

Related Stories