Color inspiration, web 2.0 style
I really love this website. As a crafter, I’m often thinking about new and interesting color combinations I can try for all my different projects. I work in color most of the time, and I’m admittedly a color-o-holic. I’m a strong believer that color in your surroundings and on your person affects your mood and quality of life.
The COLOURlovers website was a wonderful find for me, the latest application I’ve found to help users with designing and finding unique color choices.. You can sign up and create your own color palettes. You can page through thousands upon thousands of color schemes with every inspiration known to human kind - pictures, websites, magazines. I haven’t seen a website before that showed you what the inspirations were for the palettes. It’s also interesting to see what colors people pick out of the inspiration photos. People don’t see the same colors in a picture. The website creators are also interested in tracking the color choices popularly in use today, which I find interesting.
My favorite set of inspirations so far has to be the list of the 7 New Wonders of the World. Website users voted for their top Wonders, and there are color palettes for each one. The list is actually greater than 7 because there are so many possibilities, but it includes such things as the the Great Wall of China, the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá, pyramids of Giza, Petra in Jordan, the Roman Coliseum, the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, the Incan settlement of Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, Stonehenge, and Easter Island. WONDERFUL.
I’ve made a color palette for the picture I use in my header - the blues and pinks but also green. I also created a color palette for another picture that I took near her, as I was inspired to uncover the palette of local central Texas building materials - this one is the colors of granite, limestone and brick.
If you’re interested to know more about color palettes, you can also try Kuler from Adobe, which is an community-oriented online color tool. Something else I’ve tried with good results that’s a pretty inexpensive Macintosh tool is the Color Schemer software.
