If you’re stressed out after a whole week of work, web app Xoki will relax you by creating a custom, blank, colour-changing background in your browser. More »
Many of us spend hours floundering around looking for just the right colours while designing a website, presentation or pamphlet. Design blog Before & After put together a great booklet detailing a little beginner’s colour theory for complimenting your next effort. More »
Whether you’re putting together a portfolio website or just slapping together some slides, knowing how colours affect the minds of your audience makes your message more appealing. Smashing magazine offers a post that serves as Colour Psychology 101 for would-be designers. More »
Windows only: MouseZoom is a tiny portable tool that functions both as a screen magnifier and a colour picker. More »
Need a new colour palette for your next design project? ColorRotate is a colour palette generator with a heavy dose of eye candy and easy-to-use controls. More »
Mac only: Colour picker application Mondrianum adds Adobe Kuler colour schemes in a plug-in for OS X—choosing killer colour schemes has never been easier. Once installed, using the application is as simple as opening the colour picker in any application that supports choosing colours with the built-in picker, and then clicking the Mondrianum icon on the right. You can search for colour schemes on the Kuler web site, though accessing the colour scheme data requires an internet connection, so you’ll need to be online for it to work—but colour schemes can be saved as Apple colour lists for offline use, making this a great application for anybody trying to find the right colours for their projects.Mondrianum is a free download for Mac, works in most Cocoa apps. If you’d rather create a colour scheme from a picture, check out previously mentioned Colours Pallete Generator, or get colour codes in Firefox with ColorZilla.
Mondrianum [via Switching to Mac]Colors Palette Generator turns a picture with a pleasing look into a palette of equally pleasing colours for your web site or design project. You can upload any PNG, GIF or JPEG that is less than 1MB in size and Colours Palette Generator will extract colours from it. The application creates three basic palettes of the light, medium, and dark colours, as well as a grid of 49 shades from the image if you’re not satisfied with the palettes it has created. Once you’ve got the look you like, you can export it as either a Photoshop swatches file or as a CSS stylesheet. Free to use, no sign-up required.
Colors Palette Generator [via Download Squad]
