To get started with the ColorBlender, select Design > ColorBlender from the toolbar to navigate to the ColorBlender website. On the website, choose a preferred color using the color picker, and a 6-color matching palette (a “blend”) will be automatically calculated.

Using the radio buttons you may switch to Direct Edit mode to tweak or edit individual colors of your blend.

Blends can be saved for future use, and will be available whenever you return to this site from the same computer, given that your browser accepts cookies.

Are you in a hurry? Need a palette right now? Don’t have time to be creative? Click on the Browse blends link �at the top �to get thousands of color blends created by the users of ColorBlender.

Go ahead, steal one! – just click you preferred blend to make it “your own”!

ColorImpact is an award winning software for creating harmonious color schemes for your content websites. The program is based on the color wheel used by artists for centuries. The artist’s use of complementary colors, or colors opposite on the color wheel, creates an exciting painting.

There are a lot of great tools in ColorImpact, such as Matching Colors Wheel, Color Variations, Color Blender and Test Patterns. The Main Menu area is like a control center for this program and lets you explore the color tools.

The color tools let you adjust colors in the palette in order to better suit your needs. For example, the Color Variations panel lets you add and modify variations to the colors in the color palette, while the Color Blender gives you the power to create intermediary colors between any two end colors.

But the most useful tool for niche website builders is the Color Composer, which allows you to experiment and see how your color schemes look when used on real web page designs.

Color Composer

The Color Composer is an advanced color scheme designer for web pages. The flexible user interface allows you to combine one of several html templates with a number of predefined and user defined color formulas or preselected colors.

Want a quick set of pleasantly looking and harmonious colors for your new website? Simply launch the Color Composer and pick a Formula Base Color. The base color window pops up. It is a flexible color picker that gives you full control when selecting the base color.

Pick the base color, and the Composer will instantly give you color suggestions for the following main elements of a webpage:

• Page Header: Background, Logo and Top Bar
• Sidebar: Background, Heading, Heading Background, Menu Item and Menu Item Background
• Content: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Text, Background
• Links

Play with it! Pick colors from the Base Color circle and see how good the Composer is in selecting the best matches for webpage elements. When you’re done, click File > Export Colors… and save you color scheme as a CSS file.

Creating a color scheme for your website has never been this easy!

Note: This review intentionally refers to an older version of the ColorImpact, known as ColorImpact Classic. Although, ColorImpact version 3 is available, in my opinion, the Color Composer in the Classic version is easier to use and more intuitive. Moreover, the ColorImpact Classic costs $20 less.

15-day trials are available for both versions of the program. The trials have no features disabled, so you can take advantage of them all while testing it. ColorImpact has a well organized and intuitive user interface and an extensive help documentation.

ColorImpact website

– Andrei