It’s not always straightforward to find the right primary colour or even find inspiration for the colour you desire. Hours can pass by trying to discover that perfect shade.

Well here’s a new web tool that you’re going to love. It’s called Picular or “Google, but for colours” as its creators, Future Memories, like to put it.

A clever, minimalist tool

This clever, minimalist tool enables you to search for and find colours. It’s also useful as a source of inspiration or a mood board. It’s one for colour nerds and is basically a search engine that returns colours associated with keywords you can search for.

According to its creators, “Picular is a rocket fast primary colour generator using Google’s image search. If you ever needed the perfect yellow hex code from a banana, this is the tool for you.”

Picular analyses the best results from Google image searches to suggest colours related to any subject you’re researching. As a result, the tool is global, because you can search in practically any language.

So if we take the word “océan” for example. When you enter this term into the search field, Picular retrieves the 20 best results from Google images and looks for the most prominent shade in each image. Picular will then display the images as a series of mosaics.

Easy to use tile actions

For “océan”, we received back 20 shades of blues, pinks and golds from Picular. Towards the bottom of each tile is a set of associated actions. There’s a hexadecimal code for the colour with you can click and it will copy the code to your clipboard. Clicking the pin icon will pin the tile to the top of the page, so you can compare tiles easily. You can also hover over the image icon which provides a preview of the image from which the colour is taken.

The power of Picular really comes into play when you’re looking for specific shades such as coral or tan.

Our designers frequently use Picular. Of course it is no substitute for using your imagination and eye. But Picular provides an ergonomic, simple and totally free solution to discovering your next primary colour.