Yzabel / November 26, 2005

A Color Scheme Generator

A quick link for today, but one I’ve found useful when it comes to web-design and picking the right color schemes: Wellstyled’s Color Scheme Generator.

Through the use of a wheel of colors, you can pick a color dominant, and see how other colors fare against it. Different options are available; whether you wish to prioritize the view of simple contrasts or to see how multiple color schemes are rendered against the chosen background, it’ll be easy to get a first idea of what a webpage will look like. A whole set of options also allows you to check how the displayed scheme will appear to color blind people (protanopy, full color blindness…). There’s much more you can do with it, but these are already a good preview of what this color picker lets you do.

I keep a stack of such little tools nearby. I always find them useful to see in a few clicks if the idea I have in mind can work or if it’ll be a visual aggression all by itself, this without demanding me to modify my stylesheets and upload them first.

Yzabel / September 20, 2005

Typetester: Comparing fonts

Anyone dabbling with websites should find this tool interesting—it can probably be useful in other fields of application as well. As its name clearly indicates it, Typetester lets you test your fonts not only in different types and weights, but also with different colors of text and background. This way, it becomes much more easier to see immediately if your next stylesheet will make text readable or not, without having to toy with the code first.

Among other things, you can define the font (either from a predefined list or from the ones installed on your computer), its size, the letter and line spacing, the alignment… I’ve tested it for some time today, and indeed, it allows for nice and quick comparisons. The next time I want to change the font on one of my blogs, I’ll know where to go to experiment.

(Link found through A lifetime supply of bravado)