Logo - Courtesy of ColorSuckr
I often find myself needing to match colors on a website or other marketing materials to existing pictures and logo’s. If there is good documentation this is a fairly straightforward and easy task. Since ELC is often brought on to freshen up a website or rebuild it from scratch, those documents are either long gone or the original web designer never provided the client with the information.
There are a few decent online image and graphic color sampler programs out there. Until I ran across the ColorSuckr tool today, I was fairly happy with the results. Sometimes if a color was very minimal it didn’t get picked up which wasn’t an issue unless that was the color I was trying to match.
You can either input a direct link to the image you want to sample colors from, do a picture search on Flickr or you can use the Firefox plugin (If you you use Firefox as your browser.) I choose to upload my graphic and use the direct image url link. ColorSuckr output 12 colors that were almost exact matches. Even the minor colors were picked up on. For each color found the Hex, web safe alternative and RGB values were given.
Another nice option is the color scheme link. Underneath each found color, ColorSuckr provides complimentary color palette’s from ColourLovers.
All in all ColorSuckr is a really great tool! Website marketing is not only about getting the visitors, it’s about retaining them and converting them into customers.
EDIT – 8-17-2011
Unfortunately ColorSuckr’s website was found to be down today. The FireFox plugin is still available, but only compatible with FireFox 4.0 and below. At this time I do not know if the developer is planning on maintaining the FireFox plugin or bringing the website back online.