Colour help…FINALLY!!
Forever and a day I’ve found myself on the outside looking in when designers choose colours. I knew what worked and what didn’t, but choosing from the myriad of colours was something I never looked forward too. I didn’t know where to start and I’d ask all the time; “Hey, how do you come up with your colour palette?” and always it was the same, ‘oh, I just play around or you get used to it’ and that always felt so flaky to me. There had to be more to it than just baloney which is what I heard because I’m more of a science guy in my approach to just about everything.
Well as of today, I discovered thanks to Dudley Storey and his articles “Basic Color Theory for Web Designers” and “A Study In Contrasts: Font Sizes, Contrast Ratio and Accessibility” that there is some degree of minimal methodology to the craziness of generating a colour palette. Thank you Dudley! From his article I learned that there is in fact some science to this decision making process. Yippee!
Also he listed some really good tools too. Most of which you’ve likely heard of or seen, but I found 2 that I have never heard of and I think you’ll appreciate. They are:
He lists more tools in his article here: “Traditional Color Tools for Web Designer”, but I’ll tell you now I’ve worked with them all and only Coolors, Colordot and Colourco are helpful, BUT their utility is pretty much directly due to ColorHexa and Contrast-Ratio, which help you to quickly build the foundation of your palette with them and then use Coolors, Colordot or Colourco for tweaking and refining.
Curious about the tools listed or referred to here? Here is a list:
- Coolors
- Colordot
- Colourco
- ColorHexa
- Contrast-Ratio
- Kuler
- Pictaculous
- Web Colour Data
- Color Theory Quick Reference Sheet for Designers
Psssst. Dudley has a great reading list for Colour Theory here if you want the whole Web Developer Colour list. Also FYI he says it takes 3 hours to complete.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, because I tell you this took me forever to learn. The right information just wasn’t coming up in Google searches and designers were not (at least the ones I asked) being clear on their process and so I struggled.
Do you have any good Colour Theory articles or tools that help you solve your palette problems?
