Popular Color Scheme and Palette Generators

This is another roundup for online color scheme and palette generators. I categorize these useful tools by scheme, palette and miscellaneous. Choosing a suitable color at a suitable place is extremely important when you design web sites.

Here is a list of several tools for color management that can be useful for applications in printed display, on paper and on their websites or blogs.

• ColorBlender.com
  Your free online color matching toolbox
• Color Calculator
  Color calculator, with saturation and lightness adjustment.
• ColorCombos.com
  Web colour combinations tool and library
• ColorMixers
  Remixing RGB since 2003
• color palette creator v1.6
  A color swatch generator based on the tutorial located here
• Color Palette Generator
  Generate a color palette based on an image
• Color Palette Generator
  Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image.
• colr.org
  It’s a tool to let people fiddle around with colors and words.
• EasyRGB
  The first RGB and COLOR search engine on the Web!
• Gradient Image Maker
  Web-based tool that makes a linear gradient image between any two colors.
• I Like Your Colors!
  Use this tool to extract the colors from the HTML and CSS of any web site. Compare the colors easily using hue groups.
• Technicolor
  Automatic color palette generator with realtime preview and CSS generator.

Sunday Morning : jQuery + Google Translation

Sunday Morning is a jQuery plugin which allow site-owners to offer their visitors some easy and fancy ways to translate their content in more than 30 languages. It uses the Google translate API. You can have Inline translation with menu, Word translation or Translation with remote trigger. It is available as a Bookmarklet as well.

Using various triggers -like double-click, submitting forms, hovers..- the content can be translated instantly & optionally displayed in an integrated tooltip. Also, you can present a chic menu that asks the user "to which language the content will be translated".

You can visit Sunday Morning Here

BoxMaker Classic is a simple free software intended to design three-dimensional images

BoxMaker Classic is a simple free software intended to design three-dimensional images of six-faces figures, mainly typical boxes. It allows you to visualize how your boxes or books designs will look if you use this or that image, as simple as that. Despite of how simple it may seem, BoxMaker offers to you a wealth of options about how you can design and display your box, such as:

Top vertical box, vertical box Side view, Front view box vertical, vertical image Rotated, Horizontal Rotated image, CD jewel box, Pizza box, shoes box and even soft and hard cover book, and it can change each dimension on an individual basis. You can also select the images that make up the front or rear, top or bottom and sides of your box, with the only requirement that the files are in a jpg or bmp file format.

You can also set the background color for your design, allowing you to select from a wide color palette and even customize your own color. You can change the box viewing angles from zero to sixty degrees, turn your design around its own axis, zoom it in , zoom it out and move it to right or left side, as you prefer. In addition, you can experiment with the lighting levels around your design. Once your design is finished, you can save it as a jpg image.

It is a program with just two menus, whose operation is very easy and totally intuitive. It is a great program to illustrate the package images that correspond to intangible products that are delivered online. Simply, the ideal for software developers/sellers/sites.

Visit BoxMaker Classic Here

Linkvendor.com: Multiple free online SEO tools

Markus Tober made LinkVendor and all the SEO tools in context of his diploma thesis. The fundamental idea was to build lots of useful tools that can be used by everybody to learn, understand and improve. All the LinkVendor tools are for free.

• Link Value
  This special LinkVendor Tool calculates the link value per month.
• Analysis Linkpop
  The Analysis Linkpopularity Tool generates a complete site analysis. Shows backlinks, indexed sites, Google PageRank™ and also if your domain is listed in DMOZ and Yahoo directory.
• Domain Popularity
  The Domain Pop Tool shows you all backlinks for the given domain, including up to 10 subpages per backlinking domain, host IP and Google PageRank™. You also get anchor texts from the backlinking domains.
• PageRank Authenticity Check
  The LinkVendor PageRank™ Check Tool shows you the PageRank™. Also the PageRank™ will be checked of authenticity.
• SEO Challenge
  The SEO Challenge Tool compares two domains and calculates a score, based on a self-made algorithm from LinkVendor.
• SERPs Position
  LinkVendors SERPs Position Tool shows the position your domain is ranked for the given keyword and compare the results by Google, MSN and Yahoo. (Only 100 results)
• Outbound Links
  The Outbound Links Tool shows every outgoing link from the given domain. It also shows internal links.
• Keyword Density
  The Keyword Density Tool shows you how often appears which word in content.
• Cloaking Detector
  The User Agent Cloaking Detector Tool simulates the Googlebot to detect cloaked content.

Visit LinkVendor HERE

Favicon Generator: favicons made easy

Favicons Generator are small 16x16 icon files that are displayed next to the URL of your site in a browser's address bar. Additionally they're often displayed next to the name of your site in a user's list of open tabs and bookmark listings making it easier for the user to quickly identify amongst other sites.

Although many modern web browsers support favicons saved as GIFs, PNGs or other popular file formats all versions of Internet Explorer still require favicons to be saved as ICO files (a Microsoft icon format). This tool provides an easy way to convert any GIF, PNG or JPEG to ICO which is supported by all modern web browsers. It also enables you to create favicons from scratch via a handy online editor. Additionally the editor lets you manually tweak generated favicons to ensure the best possible result.

After generating a favicon with this tool download and save to the root directory of your site. Then include the code in the head of your HTML document.

Make your Favicon Here

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

A lot of people seem to think Microsoft is all about Windows and Office, and that’s it. The reality is there is a lot more going on at Redmond than you might think. The best part is a lot of the Research that goes on at Microsoft is freely available on the Internet.

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. The application takes a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location and creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all the source images at full resolution. The stitched panorama can be saved in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.

Features

• State-of-the-art stitching algorithms automaticaly place source images and determine panorama type
• Advanced orientation adjustment view allows planar, cylindrical, and spherical projections
• Support for different types of camera motion
• Excellent exposure blending using Microsoft Research fast Poisson algorithm
• Automatic cropping to maximum image area
• No image size limitation - stitch gigapixel panoramas
• Native support for 64-bit operating systems such as 64-bit Vista
• Output in a wide variety of image formats:
  • HD View
  • Silverlight Deep Zoom
  • TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and more

Support

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is provided free of charge and without official support. However, if you have questions or issues with Image Composite Editor, you may find help at the Image Composite Editor Forum, which is monitored by the developers and provides community-based support.

Skout™: a bookmark sharing platform with design resources!

Working on the web, where quality resource links are seamlessly scarce these days and where the value of a single link can be multiplied if used for a different purpose, with Skout™’s capacity, it means that designers will no longer have the trouble of searching the entire world wide web to identify awesome resources.

Skout™ is a bookmark sharing platform with design resources for designers , by designers! . Skout™ also, aims to become a one-stop-resources-shop for designers with great resources on just one page.

The site currently has of over 500 listed links, — the objective is not to have the most links though, but rather to list a reasonable number of great links. Users are allowed to submit their resources links to get them listed (and) to share with other Skout’sters.

Skout™ was founded about 6 months ago by Mokokoma Mokhonoana — a very talented graphic designer and web developer from Pretoria. He says, he decided to build up design resources links to ensure that designers will always have great resources available on just one page and to eliminate the process + frustration of ‘googling’ for resources. According to him, there are a lot of sites with good resources that are not always easy to find as their Google rank isn’t that good.

Skout also promotes resources from African creatives wherever applicable. However, Listings are not limited to African design resources websites only. But a part of this Skout project , i think, will only be a success as more resources from Africa are exposed to the rest of the world.

Spotbit: Free Online E-Book creator

Spotbit is a Free Online E-book creator which let user create ad sell their E-book online in 2 different formats, PDF and EXE.

There are tons of free PDF E-book which can be found on internet. Here, we don’t discuss how to search the ‘pirate’ E-book. Now, i want to introduce a website that let user to create free E-book in 2 different format, PDF and EXE.Spotbit let you create E-book for free, and you can determine the price for your E-book.

The system will automatically calculate the earning per book sale after you set the price. Beside these, Spotbit introduce a Digital Right Management(DRM) technology which help you to encrypt your E-book so that no people can copy your E-book content. So, bloggers can start writing and compile their posts using Spotbit to get extra income.

Visit Spotbit Here

Picnik : Free Online Photo Editor

Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart's content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames. It's fast, easy, and fun.

All tools are free, including auto- fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, color adjustments, basic sharpening, and red-eye fixing. Move over to the Create tab and you'll see that all Effects (most of which have the ability to be painted into just the areas of your image where you want them), an awesome Text tool with dozens of fonts, dozens of shapes, including seasonal shapes for holidays and events, and some super customizable frames.

It also have great Facebook-only features: show your photos on your profile page, browse and edit all photos tagged with you in them, or even browse and edit your friends' photos too!

Picnik Premium is available for $24.95 USD a year and gets you access to way, way more cool stuff. You'll get a completely ad-free experience, all the effects, dozens of shapes and fonts, plus previews of new features, premium support, and advanced editing tools like Curves and Levels!

You also get unlimited access to all your favorite photo websites right from inside Picnik, including Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and Webshots, which gives you the ability to transfer photos to and from those different sites, to and from Facebook!

12 Blogs To Help Designers Learn Web Development

It is rare to find a talented web designer that is just as proficient at web development. Obviously, one can be successful at specializing in design only, but a web designer can only benefit from having a better understanding of what is going on behind the scenes. If you want to take steps in learning some code, here are twelve great blogs that can get you on your way.

• Viget - Extend Extend is the web development blog of Viget’s blog family.
• NetTuts NutTuts, part of the popular “Tuts” family of blogs by Envato, is a great place to find easy to follow tutorials on HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails.
• 456 Berea St 456 Berea 456 Berea St is written by Roger Johansson, a Swedish web professional. The content is mainly made up of articles on web standards, accessibility, or usability.
• Woork Antonio Lupetti is the web developer behind Woork. The blog contains posts about web applications, programming, and resources for web designers. It is also full of tutorials on topics such as PHP, Coldfusion, MySQL, JavaScript, Ajax, and CSS.
• Vitamin Vitamin is a multi-author blog with tons of useful articles. It won the SXSW Award for Best Educational Resource in 2007.
• Snook.ca Jonathan Snook has been writing articles on Snook.ca since 2001. The blog focuses on web development, design and freelance.
• Signal vs. Noise Signal vs. Noise is a blog by 37Signals, the people behind Ruby On Rails and numerous successful Web Apps. Although you won’t find many tutorials on the site, it does provide great insight into the thought process of web development.
• Ajaxian With Ajax being a technology that is so closely connected to the UI and front end design of a web site, it is something that designers want to know how to do. Ajaxian is a great blog to read to stay on top of all things Ajax.
• StyleGrind StyleGrind is written by Peter Dorsi and is full of great tips and tutorials on jQuery, Ajax, CSS, and more.
• Boxes And Arrows Boxes and Arrows is full of informative articles on interaction design, information architecture, and the business side of things.
• CSS Globe CSS Globe is a community driven blog on web standards.
• Six Revisions As I mentioned in 12 Blogs That Can Expand Your Web Design Repertoire, Six Revisions is the perfect blend of Web Design and Web Development content. So I didn’t have a choice to include it here as well.