Design: Color Inspiration - Nature

Written by Guest Blogger: chekspir

We live in a colorful world, where almost everything here is in color, and I say “almost everything” because there also some black & white living things, like zebras; not a joke.

So basically we can find a “living color palette” out there everyday that we can easily use as inspiration for our designs. You may be wondering now, how is that? I’ll tell you my secret.

One of the most common problems that every designer finds all the time is lack of inspiration or problems to select a good color palette for a design. I personally always try to make every design different from others, so recycling colors is not an option.

What I do is to “pick colors” from pictures taken by me. There are many ways to do this, but for me the easiest way is to use an amazing online tool called “Photocopa” (registration is needed). It is extremely easy to use, just copy the link of a picture online, let’s say a personal Photo Album on Facebook, and paste it on “Photocopa”. (You can also search for photos on Flickr, directly from the tool).

Let’s imagine, we need to design a Green Themed Application, a good photo of a green lawn will help us to pick colors. For this example, I choose a picture that also has some orange/red flowers that will help us to add bright colors to our palette.

Then we just need to upload this photo to “Photocopa” and the app will make the magic.

As you can see, the app has selected a wide range of green colors from dark to bright. Now we just need to pick the ones we think will work in our design.

And we are done, we have our original color palette taken from living things on this world. Hovering on each color, will give us the HEX, RGB and HSV values that we can easily add to our design tool of preference.

The wonderful thing about this is that we can apply the same method to almost anything. So we can pick colors from Movie Posters, CD Covers, even a logo.

Of course we can also do this using Photoshop, but what I personally love about this tool is that it makes the process of picking colors faster and more accurate.

Now it is your turn to create an amazing color palette using your own pictures! Give it a try.

You now have more fun design homework. ;-)

Follow me on Twitter @alexchekspir