Color Inspiration
E-mail from Javin: “Hi jayse, I notice you have an excellence sense of unique color harmony in your work. Can you please share with us how you learned this? Or is it just from birth?”
I believe we’re all artists from birth, and it’s always good to learn as much as you can about everything else. Knowing your basic color theory is a must for any designer and any self-respecting visual effects artist. It’s both a learned skill and an innate ability.
Intelligent color choices can REALLY improve your design, compositing and sex-life.
Here are my main areas for inspiration and knowledge.
1. Fashion - I like looking outside ‘graphic design’ for inspiration as much as I can. The fashion industry LOVES color. They have the best exotic names (Where else can green become ‘Ice’d Glass’, or a soft-blue become ‘Innocence’?). Fashion designers are always predicting the hot colors for the new year - so that always makes for a good read. For those of you with girlfriends like mine who love shop for clothes - now you have something to keep the designer in you busy: notice those colors.
2. House-Paints - pick up free combination cards from Hardware-store paint sections - These have more useful/descriptive, less-emotional names than fashion like Lemon-Grass, Java, and Navajo-white. (which also happen to be the interior-colors of my house.)
3. Books - there are many color-books - but only a few greats.
One of my favorites is called ‘Color Index‘ because it has color schemes based on genres such as ‘Art Nouveau’, or artist such as ‘Monet’ - or moods such as somber, etc. No images - but a huge array of unique color combinations. Definitely a good reference - and a great way to learn from the master-artist.
My other favorite is Pantone’s Guide to Communicating in Color because it is context based and explains the psychological effects of color (this is good for expaning your color choices to clients etc.) Not to mention it gives many real-world examples of great design with the colors mentioned. (something lacking in most color books)
4. Sites
Some of my favorite sites are community based - and have some interesting combinations. Two faves are:
The new Adobe Labs’ Kuler: kuler.adobe.com which allows you to pick a base color and select buttons to immediately generate four additional colors as analgous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades etc. This is one of my favorite play-toys for color combos.
There are, of course, many others - but these resources should give you a really good foundation to start building your preferred palettes.
Filed under: Design Technique, Uncategorized on January 7th, 2008 | 5 Comments »