Color Color Everywhere, So Let’s All Have a Drink
As a designer, I sometimes seek out inspiration. (That’s something all creative people talk about when they don’t want to blame themselves for not having any good ideas.) Sometimes the inspiration is other websites. But I’ve found a better source: Colour Lovers. It’s an online community of people who just love color. They love talking about it, looking at it, and putting it together. The discussions are great (scroll to the bottom of the page for blog posts), but it’s that last one that really gets me. Color palettes. Thousands of them, all selected by creative people with an eye for design.
The palettes usually have a few keywords attached to them, and all of the keywords are searchable on the site. So if I’m looking for a vintage palette, or one that evokes citrus or autumn, they’re easy to find. Users are also allowed to rank them, so you can browse through the palettes that the users of the site liked the best. Just browsing through a bit, here are a few good palettes I stumbled across:
Giant Goldfish
London Bus
Trip Through Clouds
Choc Mint (I might play around with this one later.)
Sugar Bamboo
They also have an option to search for a color range. So if I want to use crimson in a website, and want to find some other colors that go with it, I can narrow the color range to shades of crimson and get every palette that uses a color within that range. (I think we chose the color for one of the rooms in our house using this tool and a painting that we wanted in that room.) Very cool stuff.
I like this better than looking at other websites because it’s a very raw source of inspiration. There’s no worry about copying a design, or needing to change it enough so it’s not just a rip-off of the inspiration. Certain combinations of colors evoke a feeling, but it’s still up to me to interpret that feeling and present it properly.
Anyway, there’s your inspiration for the day, creative folk. Enjoy!
November 12th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
I know what you mean. I have a friend, I’ll call Karen, (cause that’s her name.) And we can have a whole conversation about colors that can last for hours. Which is pretty good considering color can be an abstract concept for some people. Is my butter yellow, your butter yellow? Never mind my Puritan Blue going with your ecru. I could go on and on, alone on the subject of celery green.
November 13th, 2008 at 7:46 am
This is great — how would a tyro such as myself make use of it on my blog? If it’s not part of the standard package, I just don’t know what to do with it.
Yes, I’ve read Godot — Do you think the fact that Beckett was Irish might make the name a little significant, even though it was written in French?
November 13th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Bev – Don’t get me started on mauve. And olive green could kick the ass of every other color with the exception of hot pink.
Ana – Paint your house! Or maybe you could learn a little CSS and mess with the stylesheet on your blog. (No real need to learn HTML or anything else–it’s all externalized in the stylesheet.) Or paint your toes!
And no, I didn’t know Beckett was Irish. I’ll have to look into that, because I don’t know much about how that would influence the name.