PRETTY UNEXPECTED

Color tools
Yesterday I wrote about choosing colors for your design project. Today I’m sharing some practical tools that I use to select colors. If you have a favorite tool that isn’t on the list, you’re very welcome to share it in the comments.

Photo by Brandon Christopher Warren

COLOURlovers & ColorSchemer
The website of COLOURlovers has a large collection of palettes & colors created by users that you can look through. They also have pretty patterns that combine different colors. If you create an account on COLOURlovers you can create your own palettes, colors & patterns and save other ones you really like. The related iPhone app ColorSchemer can be used to create palettes from scratch or based on photos on your phone.

Color Scheme Designer
This tool was created to come up with color schemes for websites but you could also use it for other design projects. If you choose a color on the color wheel you can click on ‘complement’ or ‘analogic’ to find complementary or analogous colors for example.

Design Seeds
I discovered this beautiful resource the other day via Decor8. It is a lovely website where Jessica Colaluca provides you with pretty color schemes based on photos on a daily basis. She also published a few lovely books with collections of these color schemes.

Some other tips:
♥ Look for inspiration at Leslie Shewring’s A Creative Mint blog where she has organised her posts by color
♥ Get some paint samples, take them home and try out different combinations
♥ Take some old magazines and tear out images with colors that appeal to you and make a selection for your project

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