Reinventing the Color Picker

If you do any form of design work on the computer you’re probably familiar with the color picker. Whether in the form of a color wheel or a set of sliders, color pickers let you do just that — pick colors.

ColoRotate is an interesting new site that picks a novel approach to the traditional color picker design. Instead of 2D circles or sliders, ColoRotate features a 3D cone. At the core of the cone is the spectrum of colors. Intersecting that is the tint which lies on the z-axis. You can manipulate each one separately to help you arrive at your color. You can also blend two colors together.

Once you’ve picked a few colors for your palette, you can use extra controls to modify the whole palette at once, like making it warmer or moving it towards a certain hue. Other tools let you do things like get the main colors from an image, look at your color palette through reduced visions sets like red-green deficiencies and export and share your palettes. Additionally the site has plenty of information about color and color theory.

If you’re looking for a fresh new tool to help you generate color palettes, ColoRotate is worth checking out.