Luckily, there are quite a few sources for finding beautiful colour palettes or even creating your own using various methods like 3D, blending, uploading images, randomizing and more. So let’s take a look at 8 of the top colour palette sources for web designers and see how each one can inspire you to create brilliant, vibrant designs.
ColoRotate
ColoRotate is a beautifully designed site that lets you browse colour palettes and create your own in 3D. You can spin and tilt the diamond to get different views and create palettes with up to 16 colours each. They also offer a Photoshop plugin that lets you edit colours within a 3D widget and share your palettes online.
COLOURlovers
COLOURlovers is a personal favourite because it’s not just a source for colour palettes and patterns; it’s also a great community for designers and other colour lovers. You can browse and create your own colours, palettes, palette templates, and patterns. They also offer several tools to help you build colour palettes, colour schemes, Twitter themes, and patterns.
ColorSchemer
ColorSchemer has a huge collection of colour schemes for download. You can also connect with others in the colour forums. If you want to create your own colour palettes and access over a million pre-made colour schemes, you can download ColorSchemer Studio 2 on your PC or Mac for $49.99. They also have an iPhone/iPod Touch app, Mac dashboard widget and Windows colour picker desktop tool.
ColorBlender (click on browse blends)
At ColorBlender, you can blend colours together to create and save palettes for later use. You can also download palettes that you’ve created to be used in Photoshop and Illustrator. If you need a little inspiration, you can browse through their large inventory of pre-made palettes and even edit those palettes to make them your own.
ColorCombos
ColorCombos has a combo tester for testing colour combinations together and creating schemes, a combo library for browsing colour schemes and palettes, and a colour maker generating colour palette images to share. The colour scheme extraction tool is useful because it lets you grab colours from any web page just by entering the URL.
ColorExplorer
ColorExplorer lets you create, save and browse through pre-made colour palettes. One of the best parts of creating a palette is that it always shows you the Web-safe colour closest to the colour you want to use; this is great for those who design exclusively for the web. It has a lot of extra features, like the ability to apply filters to your palettes, import colours from an image, and import colours from an HTML/CSS/TEXT file.
Color Hunter
Colour Hunter lets you create and find colour palettes made from images. You can search by tag, hex code or image URL. You can also upload your own images and add pre-made palettes to your favourites for later referencing.
SwatchSpot
SwatchSpot lets you create and save random colour swatches. You can lock in the colours that you definitely want in your swatch and then click on the “shuffle colours” button to shuffle the unlocked colours. Keep shuffling and locking colours until you find something you like. This is a great way to get some quick inspiration whenever you’re just not sure where to start.