Building Your Color Palette Resources
You’ve designed first drafts whether it’s a logo or UX wireframes. If you love building a color palette like me, it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. You’ve earned it, you designed for purpose. And now it’s time to color. But it still feels daunting? Where do I start? There’s so many directions I can take the design. That’s when I go back to my color palette building resources. I am a student at heart. I love doing research and building a library for myself. It’s comforting to have a resource library to relay on for every project.
Adobe Color Wheel is a free app that allows users to build color palettes and export into Adobe programs. I enjoy manually moving around the color wheel and exploring ideas. Some of the built in tools are displaying color modes and the ability to apply color harmony rules (ie Monochromatic). An accessibility tool available is the color blind safe tool. It will show you if any colors are in conflict and would display as too similar.
Coolors is a playful color scheme generator. By clicking the space bar it will randomly create a color palette. The site is a great option for exploring trending palettes. I enjoy the color picker tool. Instead of using an Adobe program, you can upload an image and color pick on the fly. Beyond its playfulness, Coolors is thoughtful about designing for users. Two helpful tools are the contrast checker and the accessibility testing for color blindness. I appreciate they are advocating for empathic design by making tools accessible to designers.
Picular is a search engine for color. Users can type in a word in the search box and a series of colors will appear reflecting the word. The site analyzes the top images from google and presents the most prominent colors. More simplistic in nature from the other sites, Picular is a fun jumping point for color research. It’s main feature is pinning swatches for a custom palette.
Design-Seeds is a color blog started in 2009. More traditional than the other resources. The blog is a library of color palettes. Inspired by photographs, every palette collection is unique. I enjoy getting lost in scrolling the beautiful collections.
I hope you find these resources helpful and an inspiration to build your own library!