What’s your favorite color?
Every now and then our 6 year old son will ask me, “What’s your favorite color?”
It’s a question I really can’t answer. It would be like saying I love one of my children more than the other. Some days I may like one son a bit more than the other depending on the events/tantrums/trials of the day but deep inside I love them both dearly.
Except Peach – I will never, ever like Peach. I don’t know what it is but it makes me kind of nauseous when I see it. Some kind of childhood trauma I suppose. By some cosmic coincidence, they painted the house right behind us peach *sigh*. I used to really dislike Purple and any variance of Purple but lately I am coming around and can see it’s worth. I don’t foresee that happening with Peach – we will never be BFF’s.
Working with color is one of my favorite parts of being a graphic designer. Colors and how they look and feel together is so much of what we do. Color can add excitement when appropriate. Color can help the viewer feel more trusting of the company or product. Color can evoke emotions hidden deep within all of us (see peach commentary above). Color can make something feel warm or cool, carefree or corporate – the possibilities are endless.
And while our creative instincts ultimately guide us to color bliss, there are a variety of useful tools that help us find just the right hues. Interested in expanding your palette? Check out a few of our favorite resources:
Kuler
One indispensable tool we like to use when exploring color options is Adobe’s Kuler. Think social networking for color. The Kuler web-app allows you to search for color palettes submitted by users based on a word or feeling. Register for a free account and you can create your own color combinations, bookmark favorites, or download a palette as an Adobe Swatch Exchange file. Registration is free and the searches produce many, many great color combinations.
Pictaculous
One of the best ways to find a color palette is to work with what nature has already provided. Upload any image (photos of organic objects work especially well), and upload it Mail Chimp’s Pictaculous. This nifty tool will pull key colors from your image and create swatches for them. It also integrates with Kuler and COLOURlovers to suggest similar combinations. You can even submit images with your iPhone and get palettes emailed to you. By the way, if you’re looking for a great, easy-to-use manager for your email campaigns, MailChimp is the way to go.
Pantone
Of course, before the web we had the PMS (Pantone Matching System) book, which is still our bible. These books, used by printers nationwide, fan out like a paint-sample chart, showcasing an entire rainbow of luscious color options. Specify one of the spot colors and you can have it matched at any commercial printer on the planet. Need to reproduce the color in CMYK or RGB for the screen? There are books for that too.
The pages of our PMS books are worn and tattered as they get used on almost every design project. Even Pantone has moved beyond the printed page though, with its own Twitter page, an app for the iPhone and a pepper mill!
Color brings power and subtlety it brings to design. So, what’s your favorite color? (I promise not to judge if you say Peach!)
October 6th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
[...] the “What’s your favorite color?” blog post I talked about Pantone and a cool Pantone inspired peppermill. Well, I also came across [...]