Agreeing with the other reply here, and I'll expand on it a bit. When I just did a big redesign of my company's website, I spent probably far too much time play

Agreeing with the other reply here, and I'll expand on it a bit. When I just did a big redesign of my company's website, I spent probably far too much time playing with the color palette to get it "just so". I'm not a pro designer btw, but I wanted to get this as right as possible as early as possible so I had a good, well, palette :) to work with. Agreed that one of the discoveries I made is that HSB feel like the more "technical" way to design a color palette, and it felt more right from an engineering perspective. You define your colors as pure hues -- that's a top-level decision ("I want my colors for this project to be black, gray, yellow and white"). Those are your base H values. Saturation and Brightness are then your derivatives on the base colors -- lighter in some places, darker in others. This is all self-taught, so my color theory could be way off here, but I also found that you can generate fairly pleasing schemes through regular intervals along the spectrum. Pick a hue, for example, and then look at variations in saturation in steps of 10, 20, 30, etc. It's not an exact harmonic scale (or is it?) but that was enough to give me a good base. Check out the app "Spectrum" if you have a Mac -- I played with a bunch if similar apps and really loved this one the most -- still use it all the time for color exploring: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/43784/spectrum http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/43784/spectrum