Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
An Ajax Powered Color Tool
Unfortunately, not all web developers are gifted with a sense of design and color. They code up their pages to work and plan on then worrying about “the fluff” around it when they’re done. Thankfully, there are several resources out there to help just such people, including this handy tool from Sharewonders.com.
When you load up the page, you’ll see a bar on the left-hand side with a “Show” link at the top. Click that (you’d get the same effect by hitting the “Pull out the color tool” link) and you’ll be greated by a simple, clean interface to help you pick coordinating colors surrounding your selection. By clicking on one of the colors in the top row of blocks, you’ll see how the areas below populate with the matching colors. The larger color blocks can them be dragged over to the boxes on the far right of the page to create a color scheme for your site.
So it’s just another color picker, right? Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. When you’ve selected the colors in the right-hand boxes, you can save them with a scheme name and description and they’ll be added to the “Ten Most Recent Schemes” list. They use an Ajax connection to talk back and forthe between the server on this, so the save is seamless. Click on the “View” link next to a scheme and the page will update with those colors.
The site is still in development, so I know there’s more features to come. One feature I’d like to see is a few more layouts and color options. I do like that you can “fine tune” the pre-created schemes, making slight changes to the colors until you’re happy with them.
This is a very neat and useful tool. Web 2.0 is a lot about fresh and colorful design, and this would help.
Wow, I’m glad you like it! I worked hard on it. I like the idea of adding more layouts. That’s brilliant. I’ll work that in, as I have time. :)
Also, thanks for your positive review.
[...] ajaxian.com/archives/an-ajax-powered-color-tool [...]
Really handy tool. Immediately added it to my Ma.gnolia bookmarks!
Yeh it’s good stuff, very nice interface.
Saw it on Digg a couple of days ago.
Interesting Finds
Nice tool.
[...] I have received a lot of great feedback for my Color Tool. It was featured both on Lifehacker and Ajaxian, after having reached digg’s front page and del.iciou.us’s popular links. I’ve been happily surpised. My host, SolidHost.com, (even though I secretly think they’re a reseller) has been fantastic, and the server has not even blinked, but unfortunately they tell me that the account will be suspended when the bandwidth limit is reached (which will be very soon!). So I’m moving it. I have a new domain for it, it’s still pending. The only thing now is, will my bandwidth expire and account be suspended before I can either upgrade this account or can I get everything redirected in time after my new domain comes out of pending. [...]
it doesn’t work with firefox!!!!!
ah nevermind, just adblock.
it’s nice tool ! should be useful
[...] Color Tool, una herramienta para elegir y mezclar colores desarrollada con Ajax realmente increible. [VÃa] [...]
You have a nice blog, I’m visiting it every week. But I swear I saw the same design on Webhosting site a few months ago. Is design for your site 100% made by you?