Looking for a Color Picker Tool, Color Palette Tool or other Color Tools to help you with DIY Design? I've wrapped up 3 ways you can find the best Color Picker Tool and Color Palette Tools for you as a DIY Designer (and they are fun to use!).
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Ready to get your color on? Let's take a look at 3 types of tools that I can't live without right now, when it comes to DIY Design. An awesome Color Picker Tool, Color Palette Tools and a third surprise tool for Color Inspiration (in spades!).
The Best Color Tools to use now in your DIY Designs
Add these 3 types of color tools to your toolkit:
1. Color Picker Tool – Eye Dropper
When it comes to finding a Color Picker Tool, there are plenty in existence, and I have tried plenty of them. But this color picker tool is my pick – the Google Chrome Eye Dropper Tool. I started using this tool when I couldn't easily grab colors from “within” my favourite DIY Design tools.
You can grab the Google Chrome Extension here.
I wrote about this very color picker tool a while back, lamenting* over my wish to have color picker tools added IN to my favorite design tools as part of their functionality.
The Eye Dropper Color Picker Tool allows me to pick colors from any page on the web – and keeps your color history to check back on when you need to find recent colors. Being able to grab colors from any web page is handy, as you never know where inspiration will strike! This is handy for inspiration, matching colors for headings and more.
Once you sample a color from any web page with the Color Picker tool, you can then grab the hex code for that colour enter it into Canva, Easil or any tool you want to use. ie in this case it's SteelBlue with a HEX code of #42a6c2.
It's easy! If you are a chrome user, download the app now – you'll find it super handy when creating DIY Designs across any DIY graphic software.
*Surprisingly I'm still waiting on a color-picker tool to be added into ALL of my favourite DIY Design tools. Picmonkey is one of the few tools that has it as a built-in feature. But that doesn't mean that tools like Canva and Easil haven't made up for this in other areas with some pretty awesome color-palette tools and functionality. And to be honest, I don't mind using one color picker tool across both types of software. So it's a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have for me right now, and I'm sure it's coming. Read on to find out more about some of their other awesome color features!
Now, let's take a look at how we can take this further and use some pretty amazing color palette tools to match this color picker tool.
2. Color Palette Generator Tools
One of my favourite DIY Design Tool features is a Color Palette Generator tool. These work by letting you pull in colors from a photo or image. This saves time when trying to think of colors to use for text or headings around an image. Here are two examples of Color Palette Generator tools I use regularly – both built-in features of Easil and Canva (which I also featured here and here).
(a) Easil's Color Palette Generator Tool
The first time I ever saw this type of tool in action was in the DIY Design tool, Easil. Here's a snapshot of what it looks like when you click Easil's color palette tool while working on a template that includes a photo:
When you click the Color Palette in the Action Bar, you get the following options:
- Background Color – based on the background color of the design you are working on.
- Template Color – the colors in the template you are working with.
- Brand Colors – that you have entered into your brand kit in Easil.
- Image Colors – pulled in from the image featured in your design… color palette generated!
I will often use this tool to find colors to use for headings or subheadings (or for any text that I want to “pop” and stand out). Easil will intuitively pull in a nice range of colors to choose from for every image, so I love how reliable it is each time I use it.
(b) Canva's Color Palette Generator Tool
Canva's color palette generator came on the scene more recently and it's just as fun to use. Here's how it looks when you click on the color tool from any design that contains an image:
Instantly you can grab colors. In this example, it's the colors of the lemons… yellows, greens and browns, that are pulled directly from the image. Use them for titles/text, branding or even inspiration for a whole series of designs.
And as you can see, Canva also includes Brand Kit colors, logo colors and document colors as other options on the color palette.
I use Color Palette Generators in DIY Design on a daily basis. They are as important to me as my Color Picker tool, so I hope you have fun adding them to your toolkit, too!
Now, let's take a look at the last color tool resource. It's super fun:
3. Color Inspiration Tools
This last “tool” I want to mention has become one of my most-used resources in recent weeks. It pairs perfectly with the color picker tool and color palette generator tools.
I often struggle with coming up with new color palette ideas or colors to use in designs as a non-designer. This resource has made it super easy.
It's Canva's “Colors” resource. You can find it here.
There are 4 tools in Canva's color tools. I mainly use the first two of them, but they are all handy to have in your toolkit:
1. Color Palette Generator
A version of Canva's Color Palette Generator mentioned above, this tool lets you upload any photo and then Canva generates some suggested colors or hues from that photo. Only this time, it's a separate tool outside of the main Canva software. You can easily take the colors you generate and add the codes into any visual design tool or into a design in Canva.
2. Color Palette Ideas
This generates color palette ideas by searching on parameters such as colors, themes or keywords. This is the tool I use the most out of the 4 Canva Color tools. Like my color picker tool, I am constantly going to this Color Palette Ideas tool to submit ideas for a new color palette.
You can search for Color Palette inspiration by keyword or adding an overall theme or even adding a color. What I'd love to see added is the ability to add in a HEX code for a color, too. That would make it even better (hint hint, Canva!). Look at what comes up when I search under “coffee”:
I've searched on everything from colors, like “yellow” to themes, like “retro”. The results are always delicious, funky, fun and inspiring. Not to mention relevant to my search terms.
Often the colors I use from the search are nothing like I would have been able to generate from own brain. And often they are surprising, especially in terms of color combinations I'd otherwise not think of.
Once you have your color palette suggestion that you love, just grab the HEX codes and add them into your design tool. Grabbing a HEX code is as easy as clicking “copy” which copies the HEX code ready for you to paste into the color palette of any DIY Design software you are using.
Ready for coffee? Try wine, summer, berries, retro, vintage…. the inspiration is endless!
3. Color Wheel
The Color Wheel tool is another very handy piece of software that allows you to choose any color, find its complementary color and then generate ideas for:
- Creating graphics (click through to a page with red + teal colored templates opened up, ready to explore.
- Exporting the palette – you can download a PDF with the palette colors laid out ready to use as a design resource.
4. Color Meanings
This is a super fun tool that allows you to browse a list of colors and explore their color meanings ie orange is fun and adventure, etc. As you may know, colors can hold a lot of meaning and this is important when we choose brand colors or feature colors. From creating Ads to creating our logos, it's worth checking out what colors mean before deciding on them! This tool helps you to do just that!
Wrapping it up
Colors, Colors, Colors. From the Color Picker Tool to Color Palette Generators and Color Inspiration Tools, you should be covered for color tools, now. Whether you are a DIY Designer or a seasoned pro, you'll have to admit there's a tool in here for everyone to create better designs with colors. Which one will you use?
Donna Moritz
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