Design Notes - Inspired by Color
Jul 6th, 07 | 8 remarksYears ago I had a designer friend tease that I was afraid of color. Even now I smile whenever I think about that, because in a way, she was right. I often gravitate toward monochromatic color schemes. I really love how well tints and shades work together - but I also know it’s important to break away from a favorite style now and then. Sometimes, you just need to play with color.
With tools like kuler from Adobe Labs, working more color into a design can be as simple as discovering a palette someone else created! Available both online or as a cross-browser desktop widget, kuler makes it easy to find, create and share schemes. The desktop download serves nicely as a palette RSS feed, but the real tool is the website.
Start with a base color, and build your palette from there with kuler’s beautifully visual interface. Changing your base, or the entire palette, is only a matter of clicking the color you want to switch the base to, or selecting a different Rule for the palette. Scrubby sliders allow for infinite combinations, dependent only on your imagination.
The drawback - this is a preview tool, not a stable release. Logins have been extremely unreliable, and other problems such as saved schemes disappearing or problems downloading the widget have been reported as well.
Destinations ~
This weeks’ design was picked largely because I tire easily of 2.0 design. I like it, but it’s everywhere and it gets old. Biola Undergrad has taken a completely different approach not only from 2.0, but from the academically corporate blah-ness that you normally see on university sites (though in all fairness, their official site does not follow suit). The use of weathered textures, fun fonts for headings, and of course the montage from illustration to campus photo makes this site really stand out.
Cool! Sometimes it’s challenging to blend colors, this looks like a great tool to help with that. I’m excited to play around with it! I use a similar tool, ColorSmart by Behr. It’s not intended for web design, but works great for it!
OK, the Biola site is awesome.
Jul 6, 07 | 2:03 pmI never thought of using something like that - their inspiration library is a neat idea. Reminds me of this article. But then again, it doesn’t give you the hex codes. How do you go about selecting those from the schemes it suggests?
Jul 6, 07 | 3:26 pmI just print screen, paste it into Photoshop, and use the color picker, haha. Very innovative, I know. ;)
Jul 6, 07 | 8:01 pmYou should check out Colorzilla for Firefox (since you’re on board now). :) It’s a color picker extension that lives in the status bar. Very convenient and would probably save you a lot of time!
Jul 6, 07 | 9:34 pmCool, I’ll check that out, thanks for the recommendation! And yes, you’ll be happy to know that Firefox is even my default browser now! I know, I know, about time. :)
Jul 6, 07 | 10:48 pmYes, Kuler is the business. I really like the swatch exchange. Another easy to use colour picker that you might like to take a look at is colorblender.com . I use that one a fair bit too.
Jul 9, 07 | 1:52 pmHow did you find the Biola site? I live near it (the University, that is), almost considered going there :)
Jul 10, 07 | 5:29 pmWow, that’s cool. I found it on CSS Dump, which is itself a really nice site. :)
Jul 11, 07 | 7:49 am