Color, along with texture, form, shape, etc., is one of the fundamental elements of design: it is a basic visual component of any composition. In the age of the Internet, working with color for designing web pages still follows age-old rules like color harmonies and balance, but in the same time new concepts, like web-safe colors, usability, and RGB values, have emerged. Luckily, there are free tools that help the web designer deal with the new issues, and you'll find some of them listed in this post.

The first entry in this mini-roundup is the Color Scheme Generator. It allows you to create commonly used and effective color combination. Just load the site, select a starting color, then what type of scheme you wish to generate, and, voila, you have a nice palette that is pleasant to the eye. The RGB values are provided, and the color combination can be rendered as anything from default, via various pastel nuances, to pale. As an added bonus, the online application approximates how the generated color scheme looks to people with vision problems. You didn't know that 15 out of 100 people have abnormal color perception, did you? While packing a wide range of features, the Color Scheme Generator is intuitive and easy to use.

Even more preset harmonic color combination templates are available at Color Database. The online app has some interesting features like customizable panels, CMYK values, save option, and HTML template preview, but its interface is a bit on the complex side.

Another, simpler, yet often needed tool, is the 4096 Color Wheel. It also creates color schemes, but without the preset combinations of the previous apps. Its unique feature is the web-safe/web-smart/unsafe indicator, which provides web-safe approximations of any color selected from the color wheel.

What the two tools listed above accomplish can be done by anyone with professional imaging software and formal design education. For the rest of us, they are a true time-saver.

If you do not feel like creating color schemes from scratch, you can always look for a ready-made one. Probably the best-known site for that is COLOURlovers. Anyone can create and submit a color combination there, while site visitors can vote on the best ones. You will find that, as a rule, the top scoring color schemes are very beautiful. And then there is Adobe Kuler, which does a thing similar to COLOURlovers, only in Flash.

If you have bookmarked an interesting online tool for working with color, feel free to share in the comments.

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