Due to just about a complete lack of blogging over the last month, I've declared this tool review month.  I've got a bunch of random little FREE tools that I've been messing around with over the last little while and I figured I would share my experiences with everyone out there in the technology community. 

First up are two color tools.  I'm a developer by nature and not a creative specialist, so color combinations do not come easily to me.  I know there are rules out there that help dictate what looks good with what, but I've never committed them to memory.  One of the things I have learned is that making an application look good is just as important as making it work well.  In fact, it may be more important because people often buy programs that look really good but don't work worth crap.  So, how do you pick a good color scheme for your web page or application? 

Visibone has a myriad of online color picking tools that you can use from their website.  You can visit them at http://www.visibone.com/.  Scroll down and you will see a section called "Free Online Services" that houses their tools.  The one I've used the most is the ColorLab, shown below.  It allows you to choose from 216 different web colors and see how they look side by side.  It's good for choosing web colors and making sure they don't look completely horrible together, but it's a bit kludgey. 

I've just discovered (actually Ty Anderson told me) that Adobe has an online tool called Kuler available at kuler.Adobe.com which is even more impressive than Visibone.  If you click on the "Create" button from the main page, It allows you to pick a primary color then generates a color pallet for you based on a particular color scheme rule.  You can choose from five color schemes and see what it comes up with, then customize the colors as you see fit by dragging colors in the little color circle (you'll see what I mean when you visit) or by adjusting the color sliders below each color display.  Plus it has color schemes that other people have put together in case you're not feeling very creative.  Overall, it's very intuitive and extremely helpful.