Desperately Seeking Color Inspiration for your

Desperately Seeking

by Tracie Seed Communications & Marketing Manager TSPRA

When you begin thinking about a graphic design project, the first question that comes to mind is, “What colors should I use?” There are many ways you can find inspiration beyond creating a Pinterest board (which is actually a great tool). Before beginning, keep in mind the 60-30-10 rule. While not hard-fast, this theory is to use three colors: a main color for 60 percent of your design, a secondary color for 30 percent and an accent color for the last 10 percent. This recipe can help give a sense of proportion and balance to your design. But if you need to use more or even less, go for it!

Find color scheme inspiration just about anywhere. Keep a creative eye open and a camera at hand when you are on vacation, running errands or on a walk. Snap pictures of anything that catches your eye, whether it is a sunset, landscape, a product, some produce, a grouping of flowers, some clothing patterns or anything that sparks your creativity. A great Instagram account that does this for you with their own inspirational images is @the.colour.lab.

You can use an Adobe Creative Suite program’s eyedropper tool to choose a color from your image to get the HEX, RGB and CMYK codes to ensure that all your designs are consistent in color. However, sometimes this isn’t the best way as the colors may be altered by surrounding pixels, giving you a more muted version. One of the best way is to upload your photo to an online color generator, such as imagecolorpicker.com or image-color.com, to automatically generate codes that you can use when designing your piece.

There are also other ways to find inspiration on the web. One is to visit coolors.co where you can search by colors, keywords or use an automatic palette generator. If you use Canva for your designs, check out canva. com/colors/. On this site, you can generate a palette from a photo, explore color scheme ideas, learn color theory and explore the meanings behind different colors.

Whatever colors you land on, ensure your team has the codes, so all your creations are compatible.

RGB

RGB stands for red, green and blue. The code is a combination of these colors in various proportions to create any color in the spectrum. As stated, RGB colors are best used for web or other digital designs. With this code, you receive a value for each level of red, green and blue.

HEX

Hexadecimal colors (HEX) are a way of representing colors through a six-digit code. It follows the format #RRGGBB, where RR is red, GG is green and BB is blue. These HEX integers can be in a range of 00 to FF to specify the intensity of the color. HEX colors are good to use in digital or web design. Basically, a HEX color code is a shorthand for its RGB values. When entering the code into your design program, you just need to list the one HEX code.

CMYK

For printed materials, use the CMYK code. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). You use CMYK for print because a printing press uses dots of ink in varying values to make up the image from these four colors. Note: When you upload images from your phone or digital camera, they start as RGB. Convert your images to CMYK before you send files to the printer. Use Photoshop to do this: simply open your image, click Image/Mode and select CMYK Color. Save and you’re done.

Color Combos that Work

from @the.colour.lab on Instagram