Help! I stink at picking colors that go together.
Developing color palettes can be a difficult skill to master, but there are plenty of free and paid resources to give you a leg up.
COLOURLovers – Free
“COLOURlovers is an international creative community that helps people discover their inner designer. We provide people with a wealth of user created & shared color inspiration as well as tools that make the creative process as simple as possible. Whether you’re simply looking for a color palette to kickstart your next project or want to produce a piece of vector art, we have the tools and services to help anybody from go from design inspiration to execution. There are 4,060,125 COLOURlovers around the world who have created 7,103,660 Colors, 3,139,088 Palettes and 3,997,390 Patterns.”
Colllor – Free
“With Colllor it is much easier to generate a consistent web color palette with just a few clicks. You should use colors consistently, so you have a common look and feel throughout your design. All the alternative proposals produced by Colllorderive from the same color and they all have a common denominator sharing hue, lightness or saturation values. This tool will let you find the exact value of darker shades of any color, not just something that ‘looks darker’. That will be a huge step towards professionally looking design.”
Adobe Kuler – Paid. (Part of Adobe Creative Cloud)
“Kuler® is a cloud-based application for making color themes using an iPhone or your browser. Capture colors from a mural, garden, or wherever you happen to be. Create and share your own color combinations, browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community, sync your themes right to Adobe® Illustrator® CC, and start using them in your designs.”
NOTE: You can also access the Kuler tool (for free) through desktop versions of Adobe Illustrator CS5 or later under Window > Extensions > Kuler.