About Colour Palettes
[hide] How many websites have you visited where the text is difficult to read against the background? Well, I've seen too many. It appears that some graphic designers think the appearance of a site is more important than its legibility. I disagree. This is form over function. Make it legible, then make it pretty - but maintain the legibility! So here is a colour palette designer that gives you shades based on a single colour and the complementary colours associated with each of the shades.
How it works
There are two rows of six colour swatches. The top left swatch is the reference colour which you set with the Red, Green and Blue sliders. The remaining five swatches on the top row are coloured with increasingly darker shades of the reference colour. Each of the lower row of swatches is the complementary colour for the swatch immediately above it.
By moving the R, G or B slider, you set the reference colour and the colours of the remaining swatches are set automatically. Note that you can also set the colour values for the primary colours by editing the hexadecimal values in the input boxes to the left of the sliders. The hexadecimal colour value for each swatch is shown immediately below it.
The SYNC slider moves all the colour sliders together. If you want to move the SYNC slider without changing the colours, click on SYNC and the slider will become grayed out. You can now move the SYNC slider without it affecting the other sliders. To switch it on again, click SYNC again.
You can test to see how a pair of colours perform for legibility by clicking the buttons below a swatch. The F button sets the foreground colour and the B button sets the background colour. The test area below will show the selected colour combination.
OK, so here it is, a colour palette designer that gives you a set of colours that work well together, and which you can test for legible combinations of foreground and background colours. Never again do you need to design websites that are hard to read. Have fun.
Color/Colour Palette Designer
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