One of the first and hardest part of starting to design a site is to get the color scheme. The scheme can come from a number of places. For example:

• A site you want to imitate
• A photo you want to include in the site – for instance in the header
  You can then pull colors from the photo
• A holiday – certain holidays have color associated with them. Halloween has black and orange, Christmas has red and green, etc.
• A profession – for instance the medical profession tends to favor blues

No matter where you get your inspiration, it is good to have a few tools to help you. I recently ran across a page that lists a number of these tools:

http://www.kelieresources.com/color.htm

I’ve included the most valuable tools, from my perspective, here:

• Original Color Mixer
• Color Scheme Generators
• Cool Flickr Photo Picker
  This isn’t technically a color scheme picker, but it’s cool 🙂
• Visibone Color Lab
• I Like Your Colors Grabs colors from the web page you specify

That’s it – if you have any others you think should be on this list, let me know and I’ll add them.

I had to match a font from a letterhead today and I came across a couple of great tools for the task.

First I found FontMatcher, a VB6 program that takes a BMP image and matches it to your TTF files. The catch is that you have to have the font already for it to find it. I didn’t so it didn’t match my font.

I finally found a great tool that searches their own online font database: What the Font. It even allows you to purchase the font after it finds it for you ;). Saved me a lot of time though – it’s worth it.