Random colors in Thoughts, wishes and things

Sometimes it feels like there’s not enough colors in the world. I know that’s incorrect, but sometimes I feel like that when I’m graphing something and need a bunch of different colors for it. Or for anything color-coded, really.

I like the color-pickers in graphics programs, where you can move the cursor around and pick whatever you want from a virtually infinite choice. The only problem with this is that it’s too much choice, and then I wind up agonizing for ages over my choice of color. Depending on what I’m using it for, that’s just way too much over-thinking.

All too often, when colors are presented as choices, there’s a little too much of a tendency to pick the most basic standard colors, like a mid-blue, a bright red, a green, and a highlighter-yellow. This is not very exciting, and often these colors are kind of too strong to be really trendy anyway.

There are several options I like for color inspiration. One of my favorites is color-hex, which starts off showing you the top favorite recent colors of users. That’s a great page to get inspiration in itself. But more than that, it gives out a ton of information on each color. If I click on a color, I get not only the hex code (which I can use to get the exact same matching color in my graphics software), but also lighter, darker, and related colors. The information about those other colors is very helpful if the original color I picked was close to what I wanted, but not quite right. I also like their color palettes, which are user-submitted sets of colors that work well together. Some palettes might look great as a logo design but not be very useful for web design, and vice versa. Also, there are some palettes that are made of highly contrasting colors while other palettes are more monochromatic; again, it depends on what you’ll be using it for.

However, there is an option I like better for palettes, and this would be Coolors. It generates colors that look good together, and I find that I’m a lot more likely to get great palettes this way, where I’d actually use all of the colors. Besides the hex color you can get lots of other info, including the Pantone code. The only downside is that it doesn’t automatically generate CSS (or at least not that I could see - maybe it’s different for signed-in users). So while it excels at web colors, I couldn’t see a way to generate CSS code without having to cut and paste the hex color into your existing code. That’s a little frustrating.

Another option for color inspiration is this free random color generator. It generates a bunch of colors that it shows you, gives the hex codes of each, and also gives CSS code for in case you want to use it on the web. For web situations, it gives CSS separately for black and for white text on the color, so you can choose which one you’d like to use. You can generate new colors as often as you’d like, which is great if you don’t find anything you like first time around. For ease of use for CSS, this is what I like.

Last updated October 02, 2020