PaletteBook

Good designs ruined by a poor choice of colors are not unheard of. Whether we’re referring to graphic, web or application design, it’s important for the artist to carefully choose the colors that he or she works with.

The more advanced graphic editors will already have a built-in color picking tool. But if you feel limited by the options at hand, you can always look for more apps that could help you choose your favorite tones and nuances. Once such program is PaletteBook.

As its name suggests, PaletteBook allows you to save your colors of choice in one or more palettes, and keep them for immediate or later use. In order to do this, the program offers you a color picker and not much else. An eye-dropper tool, for example, would have been essential, and it’s hard not to notice its absence from the very beginning.

Still, the app is not devoid of features. When you move the selector around the color picker, the names of the various colors will be displayed; this may be useful information for a designer, as will be the hex codes that can also be copied directly from a palette.

During the selection process, you also get information about a color’s RGB or HSV numbers. Except for these values and the hex code, there’s really not much else you can do with your palettes, except look at them and notice how pretty they are. You’ll have to hope that they actually make a good design, because PaletteBook doesn’t offer any basic layout preview where you could check if your colors really match.

Also, the program doesn’t tell you which nuances are web-safe and which aren’t – an information essential to any web designer. As you’d expect from a Windows 10 app, PaletteBook has a beautiful and intuitive design. But even if it comes at a very small price, it’s safe to say that you can find free programs that do a lot more.