Effective use of color in your white paper can elicit powerful emotions in a reader, connecting your product or service with this emotional response. When the right color palette is chosen, then, your B2B marketing efforts have the potential for resonating on both mental and emotional levels.

But choosing the right color scheme can be difficult. At the early stages of the design process, even choosing a starting point can be challenging.

So I’ve put together a list of my favorite 3 tools for choosing colors for your white paper design.

1. COLOURlovers COPASO

COLOURlovers offers both a powerful tool along with an active community of color enthusiasts. “Color enthusiasts” may not sound all that exciting to you, until you consider that the members have created a massive database of color palettes (over a million combinations) to get you inspired for your white paper design project.

In addition to the existing libraries, which you can export in several formats, including HTML, PSD, and AI, you can start from scratch to create your own combinations. You can also upload an image and use its colors as a starting point. Finally COLORlovers offers a pattern generation, from which you can create patterns based on the palette you’re working with. Visit COPASO to get creative with your colors.

2. Adobe kuler

With Adobe’s color tool, you can choose from existing themes created by the community, or begin with an image (as shown above). This can be something you’ve uploaded, or something you’ve found on Flickr. Once you’re logged in, you can title images and tag color schemes for later use.

Additionally, you can let kuler “Select a Mood” and generate a palette from the image you’ve uploaded. This can be a great starting point for the color scheme of your white paper. Check out kuler to get started.

3. CSS Drive’s Colors to Palette Generator

While the first two tools are full-featured color palette suites, this color generator focuses on creating palettes from images you’ve uploaded. You can upload an image from your hard drive or have the site retrieve any URL. The tool gives you the hex value on the fly, but you can export your new color schemes to Photoshop format (.aco) or straight to CSS file, the latter of which may be useful if you’re building a landing page or microsite around your white paper.