I love color. I love names of colors, especially paint colors. Dill Pickle, Olive Branch, Barley, Sea Urchin, Burnt Peanut Red, Cool Lava, and Sweet Butter are a few succulent names I just pulled from a Benjamin Moore color guide.A quick guide to color for graphic and web design: There are two different color modes - CMYK and RGB. RGB (the red-green-blue light emitted from a monitor) is the mode for computers and internet. CMYK represents the four inks - cyan, magenta, yellow, and black - that are used for four-color printing. Here is a good article explaining the differences.
You may have heard the term "web safe colors," which refers to the 216 cross-browser color palette, created to ensure that all computers would display the colors correctly when running a 256 color palette. This is not as important today, because most monitors can display millions of different colors. W3 schools.com is a great resource for HTML colors.
An important color system to know about is the Pantone Matching System (PMS), a standardized color system developed in the 1960s by Pantone, the "global authority of color." Pantone sets color trends, each year selecting a color of the year. The 2009 color of the year is PANTONE 14-0848 Mimosa, representing "hope and reassurance" during tough economic times.
Here are a few online resources for choosing colors for a project.
Kuler is a beautiful Flash site from Adobe. Themes have five colors each. You can browse and rate themes created by users, create your own themes, download themes to use in Adobe Creative Suite applications, and even use color extraction tools to generate themes from your favorite painting or photograph.
Color Schemer and
Color Schemer Online
You can browse through hundreds of color schemes created by users (for free) or purchase their software. I have never used the software myself or downloaded schemes. I just browse through the schemes as a quick reference. I noticed they have a free Galleria dashboard widget that I will probably try out. (I like widgets!)
Visibone Color LabThis is a fun visual tool for browsing the 216 web safe colors. Each color also includes RGB and CMYK values.
Please let me know what online color resources have been helpful to you. Happy color journeys!
3 comments:
So glad you're blogging again! Now I have someone to nerd out with about graphic design.
If I'm programming CSS (cheating using Dreamweaver of course -- I can't write code on my own but I can read it. Kind of like I can read/listen to Spanish and figure it out, but can't actually speak it), I refer to this. CSS colors offer many more options than the web-safe RGB palette.
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_colorsfull.asp
Also, I HIGHLY recommend you purchase the Color Index handbook by Jim Krause, published by HOW Design Books, if you don't have it. It's an excellent resource for when you need a color pick-me-up and provides RGB and CMYK values.
Yeah! Graphic design nerds!! Thanks for the tips.
Can I really be a designer if I secretly feel completely overwhelmed and intimidated by color?
Awesome resources, Julie. Thanks for putting them all in one handy place. : )
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