Posted by Charlotte Lamb, Designer

I’m not talking about a certain brand of paint usually represented by a large, hairy dog. No, I’m taking about how hard it can be to choose colours for your next project, especially if you don’t have a corporate colour scheme. There are a few tools online that can help and as I have tweeted these links and received quite a bit of feedback I thought I would also post them here.

I have used OKI’s colour scheme generator for a while now. It will produce classic complementary, triadic and quadratic schemes when you enter a colour value or pull the spokes around the colour wheel.

This link to the ColorLovers site was tweeted to me by LushGardens and it’s brilliant. It includes user generated schemes and has a variety of forums, palettes, patterns and even a blog about colour.

Provided the name is not already registered by someone else you can pretty well use whatever you like and you can have a number of different names pointing to the one website.

The most popular domain names for businesses end with either .com or a .co.uk. So which do you choose?

A co.uk clearly shows to people that you are a UK based company, is this important to your customers?

A .com is associated with a non geographic international businesses, that is to say ones that are looking for customers in many countries or wish to appear as an international organisation.

So you have decided between co.uk and .com, how do you choose the rest of the name.

There are 2 routes that you can take to choose the rest of the name, you can simply use your company’s name, which is fine. Or you can choose a name that reflects what you sell or the services you offer.

Whatever you choose you need to remember that your domain will also form your email address, the name needs to be as short as possible and you should avoid the use of hyphens etc, to make it as simple as possible for your customers to remember.