Whether
you are designing a clean corporate website or a grunge portfolio site,
color is going to play a major role in how the design is perceived by
the audience. That’s why it’s important to get the colors right
upfront. There are plenty of tools out there made especially for this,
but like anything else some are better than others. Here are 10 color
tools that I think are exceptionally useful.
As well as being a useful way to choose colors, ColoRotate looks
cool and is actually fun to use. Instead of using two dimensional
viewers, it presents color palettes to you in 3d and in real time.
Kuler is a community driven web app that lets your browse color
palettes created by others. You can also create your own by using the
color wheel, harmony rules, and color sliders.
Color Scheme Designer has been around for a while, but was just
recently updated with a brand new interface and a new color scheme
generating engine.
COLOURlovers provides more than just a way to find color palettes.
It is also a place to network with other people to discuss color
related topics, and read interesting articles about all things color.
Copaso is COLOURlovers palette generating tool. It’s rich feature
set allows you to save colors to a scratch pad, extract colors from a
photo, and publish a palette for thousands of other people to see.
Color Blender let’s you select a preferred color and then it
generates a six color blend based on that color. From there you can
tweak each individual color.
Toucan allows you to select up to 20 colors for each palette either by using color association or from an uploaded image.
ColorMunki gives you the ability to search colors from built in libraries and using keywords.
With Color Wizard you can submit a base color and it generates color
schemes based on your color’s complementary color, split complementary
colors, analogous colors and other variations.
Color Explorer is a fairly new color palette generating tool, but boasts a well organized set of features.
KompoZer is a fully-featured web authoring system that has an integrated FTP client, an intuitive tabbed user interface, and support for all major operating systems.
Bluefish Editor is a lightweight, fast editor for web designers and programmers. It has useful wizards for HTML documents, great project management features, and a powerful search-and-replace option for quickly batch-replacing source code.
Quanta Plus is a robust web development IDE. It’s highly-extensible and is able to run custom scripts. It has an excellent visual CSS editor that has code hints and auto-completion of syntax.
Amaya is a free, open source web editor and web browser developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Amaya started as an HTML/CSS editor and has since grown into an editor for many XML-based systems like SVG and MathML.
CSSED is a fully-featured GTK-2 based CSS editor that has a plugin system for utmost extensibility; check out some of the available plugins for CSSED.
Open BEXI HTML Builder is a browser-based open source application for creating HTML web pages. It has a CSS color picker built into the interface and a very simple project management option.
NOTEPAD++ is a very popular open source text editor for Windows. Though not strictly just for web designers, it has an excellent source code editor the supports HTML, XML, CSS, and JavaScript.
jEdit is a text editor created for programmers. It can run on Mac, Windows, and Linux and has syntax highlighting for HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript and many other languages.
SeaMonkey, fostered by the Mozilla Foundation, is an "all-in-one" web browser that has a simple yet powerful HTML editor for in-browser source code editing (called SeaMonkey Composer).
GIMP, one of the most popular open source projects currently out on the market, is a feature-packed image editor and graphic design suite. For those who like Photoshop’s interface, check out Gimpshop – an extension that roughly mimics Photoshop’s interface.
Inkscape is the premier open source vector graphics editor (much like its commercial counterparts, Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW).
Krita is a painting and image-editing software application for KOffice.
Karbon14 is a scalable vector-based drawing application that’s part of the KOffice project.
As a web designer, you’ll often need to storyboard and prototype your designs or create flowcharts for navigation schemes; Kivio is an excellent diagramming/flowchart editor to help you boost your prototypes, wireframes, flowcharts, and diagrams.
Dia is another wonderful diagramming tool to help you draw diagrams and flowcharts.
Skencil is a vector drawing application that’s great for illustrations and diagrams. You can save your compositions in EPS format - a format recognized by most vector-editing applications.
OpenOffice Draw is a simple yet powerful drawing/diagramming utility that’s part of OpenOffice software suite.
mtPaint is a simple painting utility developed by Mark Tyler (mt); it is perfect for simple painting and editing.
If you ever need to edit fonts for your designs you may want to check out FontForge, a handy, open source font editor.
ImageMagick is a robust image-editing suite that lets you compose images in bitmap-based formats. It can open and save in over a hundred formats, including popular web formats such as GIF, JPG, SVG, and PDF.
GraphicsMagick is fondly referred to as the "Swiss army knife of image processing" by its core developers. It supports many image formats; you can view a list of them here.
HTML TIDY is a free, open source utility for fixing and optimizing HTML syntax.
FileZilla is typically thought of as the most popular open source FTP client. It is cross-platform compatible (available for Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems) and has the ability to transfer files through numerous protocols.
There may come a time when your client/project leader will ask you to design a computer simulation (such as an activity in an e-course or a tour of a website’s services). If you ever need a screen-capturing app, look no further than CamStudio, a fully-featured open source, screen-capturing tool.
Web designers often need to take screenshots; usually for documentation and for in-browser design presentations. Greenshot is a wonderful and robust screenshot application that’s free and open source.
ZScreen is an exceptionally useful open source screen-grabbing utility that can take full-screen, viewable area, and just certain regions of the items in your monitor. You can set it up to automatically FTP screenshots; a helpful function for easily sharing and archiving your images.
Xournal is a simple note-taking/sketching utility that lets you use your tablet as an input device. It works similarly to Windows Journal.
Firebug is an extremely useful and versatile web page debugging tool. You can use it to learn and explore your HTML and CSS markup.
With Gallery, you can take greater command of your image repository. Gallery is a web-based image gallery that you can use to store, organize, and access image assets online.
