Fun Friday Resources

Let’s look at color on the intertubes.

Just for fun—because they’re pretty—start with Public Domain Review’s overview of color wheels and color theory from the past.

If you work with color on the computer, you have had to deal with the hex values of colors. Their full name is ‘hexadecimal codes,’ because the system counts in base-16: 0123456789abcdef. The color codes have six digits, two each for the red-green-blue colors of light; they range from 000000 (black) to ffffff (white). All told, there are 16,777, 217 hexadecimal colors.

There are a plethora of sites to help you with those codes.

First, if you need names for a color, try Coloria or Name That Color.

If you have your color and need to lighten or darken it, try 0to255. You can pick from the array on screen or type in your hex code in the upper right. The whole scale of your color is then displayed along with all the hex codes.

If you have a photo and need some exact colors to go with it, try Color Palette Generator. You provide the URL of the image you want to work with, and it generates a palette to go with it.

For the ultimate in color options, head to W3Schools.com and check out their huge color page. If you can’t find what you need there, it does not exist.