Instant Color Picker

A huge part of graphic, web and application design is finding the right colors and combining them effectively. While most design programs offer you a lot of color picking possibilities, there may be times when you might need just a bit more versatility.

If you’re really passionate about finding the perfect colors for your project, then Instant Color Picker could be your best option.

Instant Color Picker (or ICP, for short) may look like a disarmingly small app at first. When you open it, you get just a bar with a few colors and an eye dropper on top. But when you start exploring its possibilities, you quickly find that the program is anything but simple.

Each of the app’s functions can be opened in a small new window, and the one that you will probably activate first is they Eye Dropper, which lets you pick colors from anywhere on your desktop. Colors are instantly added to the main palette which can hold as many as 20.

In the Color Palette, you can right-click a color and copy its code (you can choose between HEX, RGB, HSL, and others) and you can also make the color web-safe. Or you can double-click for a new Color Properties window; with this function, you can choose to see variations of the color, lighten or darken it, saturate or desaturate it.

If you right-click on the top the Color Palette, you get a context menu where you can open other tools as well. Quick Color Palette shows you the full color spectrum, but also the web-safe palette. The window doubles as the Named Colors tool, where you can actually search color names like peach, lavender or chartreuse and get instant results.

There’s also the Test Layouts window where you can try out different color combinations, a Windows Color Dialog tool which is a more complex palette for finding custom colors, and finally the HTML Quick Reference window, where you check out a few basic HTML tags. Yes, ICP can also help you write HTML code.

It would have been difficult to praise this app for its helpfulness had I not summarized nearly all its functions. To be completely fair, if you’re used to the comfort of easily accessible drop-down menus, ICP’s small windows may seem a bit alien during the first few minutes. But even if it doesn't seem user-friendly at first, it’s still pretty intuitive, and, if you happen to get lost, you can find more info in the help documents or on the program’s website.

One may argue that most editing programs come with a color palette nowadays. Still, you don’t often get this much power and versatility in such a small package, and the fact that Instant Color Picker is free makes it hard not to want to recommend it to all your designer friends.