New year, new palette
We’re officially in the doldrums of winter and I guess I’ve been dreaming of color. Last week I designed a colorful and calming background pattern, and I thought it’d be fun to stay within the same theme this week.
When I began designing, I thought about the way we pick colors in an app or design program. It’s something that’s so baked into these programs that we take for granted how easy it is — it almost doesn’t even seem like a color picker was ever designed. But, like everything, they are designed — and I thought it’d be fun to try my hand at creating one. I decided I didn’t want to do a standard “eye dropper” style color picker for my challenge, since that’s so commonplace — I wanted to do something simpler, but also a little fun.
All my thoughts on color got me thinking about the famous Pantone color system and their annual “color of the year.” After a quick Google search, I found out that Pantone’s color of the year for 2021 is actually…two colors! They selected “Ultimate Gray” together with a yellow they call “Illuminating” and I thought it might be fun to use one of the color palettes they created with these colors of the year as inspiration (I used the palette called “Aviary”).
The idea was to make a modal that might be part of an app where one could collect samples of favorite colors for projects. The colors enlarge with the Pantone swatch details upon mouse hover, or a finger tap, as animated below.
There’s also a “+” icon to add the color to your collection, and the option to save the entire palette of colors to your collection:
To make the Pantone cards feel authentic, I grabbed screenshots from their site to display the true look of swatches they offer. I then precisely cropped each swatch so that they could stand out with a pop, when the user interacts with each color.
I really am loving doing these animations in Figma, because it’s a true challenge to make it feel smooth and flow well. I also generally love this color assortment that Pantone curated and designing this little color picker made me smile. Which color from this palette is your favorite?
