I'll be honest, my artistic abilities kind of max out once I get to doodles and stick figures. Sure, I can draw 3D cubes better than anyone that I know, or nice UML diagrams on a white board, but I've always struggled from a user experience perspective when it comes to building web or Windows user interfaces.

One of the biggest frustrations that I've always had is color selection. I've always been horrible at it, but mostly because standard computer science curriculum and most textbooks on developing software spend very little time on color theory or selection.

It's not until recently, when I've been dedicating more time to understanding using CSS for designing web pages, that I've come to better understand color theory. There are many great CSS books out there right now that spend a decent amount of time discussing color selection. Through one of these books, I came across the Color Scheme Generator web application.

This is a great little web application. You can use the color wheel to pick out your base hue. If none of the base colors suit your need, and you have the RGB value for another color that you'd like to use, you can enter the RGB value and generate a custom color scheme. From the chosen base hue, the Color Scheme Generator will generate a palette of usable colors in either a monotone, contrast (using the complementary hue), triad (3 colors), tetrad (4 colors), or analogic color scheme. In addition, the Color Scheme Generator will let you adjust the size of the angles for the triad, tetrad, and analogic color schemes to vary the colors even more. Once the color scheme has been chosen, you can also alter the chosen colors more by choosing pastel, dark pastel, light pastel, contrast, or pale colors.

This is a great utility for selecting colors to use in a document or to use as the basis of a user experience for either a web or Windows application. Definitely add this tool to your toolbox.