
Ask HN: How do you find a colorscheme for your project? - mixmax
Assuming that you do webdesign yourself, at least initially, how do you go about finding a good colorscheme?<p>Do you "borrow" from a site you like, get help from design-savvy friends, use online color tools, or do you just have great design sense and come up with breathtaking colorshcemes at the drop of a hat?<p>If there are any good online resources for this please share them :-)<p>Thanks!
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tricky
I grab a camera and take pictures of things that were obviously put together
by someone who knows color.

There is a neighborhood full of very well-painted homes that has inspired a
few of my designs. One time I pulled a color scheme from macro shots of my
backyard. My client said, "Wow, I really like that brown, what is that?"

It was dog poop.

~~~
icey
Ah yes, the Caganer color theme. It just goes to show you that sometimes
people don't realize what they want.

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jfornear
I mostly pull colors from images, but <http://www.colourlovers.com> and
<http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html> are sometimes
helpful. FireBug is real helpful for experimentation.

The best advice I know regarding color schemes: spend time up front finding a
good 6-8 colors to cover everything from backgrounds to link hovers, and then,
stick with that scheme for your first iteration so that you don't get hung up
on choosing colors all the time.

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lbrandy
Abject thievery.

As I waste-time on the internet (err, do market research) I bookmark
attractive sites. My only scruple is that I try to pick a site that is totally
off-topic in a completely different industry. One of my projects recently "was
inspired by" <http://heroku.com/>. I hope they take that as a compliment.

~~~
ErrantX
I employ a similar method. Rather than thievery I think it is just influence.
I will use bits from several designs I think work well (layout ideas from one,
colurs from another etc etc.).

~~~
atourino
Remember that the secret of creativity is how well you hide your sources. ;)
Most creative works now stand on the shoulders of giants.

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tptacek
A well-known designer trick I've used is to spend 20 minutes paging through a
stock photo site (I like sxc.hu), find a picture you like with some good color
contrasts, and pull it into an image editor to eyedrop colors out.

Kuler has tools that support this workflow too.

What I don't get is the "shopping for color schemes" workflow that sites like
Kuler support by default. I have also never liked anything that came out of a
"generate split complements" color wheel tool; the real aesthetics of things
like triadic schemes depend too much on saturation/value, and not enough on
hue.

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misterbwong
Work with grayscale first. Design your UI with contrast in mind rather then
color. Then when all the main elements are in place, pick a good color scheme.
I've always found colourlovers.com to be an invaluable resource.

~~~
jfornear
What about for images? Rounded corners, gradients, logos, etc. I would imagine
going back and messing with all those later would be a real pain, which is why
I think choosing and settling on a color scheme from the start is important.

~~~
alabut
Not at all - it just depends on how good a designer you are and/or comfortable
with html/css.

~~~
jfornear
images don't have anything to do with html/css

~~~
alabut
It depends - are you prototyping by making wireframes in an image editor or
prototyping by coding up a rough working copy? If you're a designer and prefer
mocking stuff up in Fireworks or Photoshop, then you should have the chops to
build upon the gray boxes and text and layer in effects to add visual polish.
If you're a coder and would rather create crude functional demos first, then
you should have the html/css chops to layer in visual polish via background
images or etc.

Either way, designer or coder, it helps to concentrate on the rough
functionality first and then layer things in later, like typography, logos,
icons, color schemes and other visual polish.

I'm giving a talk at Adobe in about a week and a half on the subject of rapid
prototyping in Fireworks, I think there'll be a screencast or video going on,
for anyone interested:

<http://www.meetup.com/Fire-On-The-Bay/calendar/9583191/>

And don't just take my word for it, Mark Boulton's got a great PDF book out
with the same approach, if you're interested in improving your process as a
designer:

<http://www.fivesimplesteps.co.uk/>

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rdrimmie
I am absolutely not a graphic designer. Usually I start with a dominant colour
that I like (for example the default orange header here) and I'll plug it into
a colour-match system like <http://colorblender.com/>

Another resource I've used to good success is <http://kuler.adobe.com>
(requires flash) which lets people (some of whom are quite a lot more
competent than I at this) create and share colour themes.

Finally, a neat tool that I saw make the rounds recently is
<http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php> which lets you search on a
word and uses Yahoo!'s image search to come up with some colour suggestions.
That is not a theme place, but it's a fun way to perhaps stumble across a
colour you like to use with tools like those above.

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thehickmans
I'll second <http://kuler.adobe.com> as a great tool to find or piece together
a color scheme.

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Hoff
Hire somebody that's good at this stuff; same as dealing with icons and images
and such.

Creating good color schemes and good icons is as much a specific skill as
creating good code.

If you're serious about a product, it's worth the investment. The first thing
folks see with your project is the UI; the colors and the icons and such,
after all.

~~~
jrockway
Is this really good advice? I assume the OP asked because he wants to learn.
You don't learn when you pay someone to do things for you.

Also, not everyone has money to spend at the beginning of their startup.

~~~
ja2ke
I think the quality of that piece of advice depends on a few things.

One obvious one is the audience you're expecting. If you're selling to a bunch
of other coders, maybe a great design is less important than your feature list
and the first-glance at documentation. If you're trying to do something social
aimed at college students, or moms, or something, it may become worth
considering, depending on the second point.

The other, less obvious (and less insulting than it sounds) one is, frankly,
if you're any good at design. This might sound harsh (and will maybe be
disregarded coming from a designer), but good design is harder, and more
subtle, than most people think. Many programmers (and
managers/producers/friends/pets) know just enough about design to be
dangerous. Unlike the source code, _everyone_ on a project sees the design,
and _everyone_ has seen and interacted with a million designed websites and
front-end interfaces. Hell, most people on most teams have probably built
their own full site from scratch, often many times over.

What that means is that when it comes to the design of your site and whether
or not to call an outsider, you need to be honest with yourself. Do you know
enough, or do you know enough to be dangerous? When you're making decisions
about how a piece of art looks, or how a point of interaction works, are you
thinking first and then acting, or are you acting first on something that
seems cool and then retroactively filling in reasons behind that act to
reassure yourself that you're being smart? Do you like a widget on that site
because it maps to a specific end-user need you're trying to fulfill, or
because of their fancy javascript implementaton?

As for wanting to learn to be a better designer, I think my best advice is to
not do it on the job. If your motivation is truly to learn and gain skills for
the future, it makes no sense to risk your current project by using it as a
classroom for your own benefit. Would you let your graphics designer friend
check chunks of code into your site to teach him how to program?

If it is a matter of not having the funds, then obviously you must make the
best with what you've got! If what you've got is yourself, no free time, and
no money, then there is definitely some excellent advice for how to inspire
yourself in a pinch spread across this thread.

If you have time, though, I think that as a designer, beginning or seasoned,
the most important question to ask at any juncture is "why?" Most of the
advice earlier in the thread seems to stop at "I find some colors that I like
and just use them." That's sound advice, as long as it takes the next step!
Why did the designer of this other bicycles-themed site choose these colors?
Were they really trying to communicate some mood or tone or feeling about the
product, or has their parent company's logo just been a blue and yellow plaid
since 1936? Why did the designer of this site decide to make the login panel
side down instead of just appear instantaneously? Further, why wasn't the
login panel simply visible the whole time, why was the decision made to hide
it by default in the first place? Was there some sort of intended user
behavior or control of site flow there, or was someone just excitedly jerking
off because they'd discovered ui.jquery.com?

If you have the time to explore, start a smaller or less risky project,
personal page, or hobby endeavor, and use that to learn the ropes, to find out
what your strengths are, what you like about designing things. That might
sound a tad touchy-feely, but finding out what you like about design and what
you do well will help you when its time to sit down and do something real.

Also, if after some exploration, you do find that design really just isn't you
for whatever reason, your best bet is to instead spend the time learning the
language of design so you can properly talk to and problem-solve with people
who _are_ really into design and (if they're good) share your goals of
building quality things. Learn the basic terms surrounding typography and
colors, of desktop publishing and layout. Learn what is complicated for a
designer and what is easy, and remember that, like programming, while
designers strive to achieve results which look very simple and clean to
"outsiders," the path they take to get there is never as easy and simple
looking as the output it presents.

That was certainly more rambling than I intended. Sorry, guys.

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showerst
There's a fantastic (physical) product design blog at
<http://www.thedieline.com/> that I often use as inspiration, especially since
many of the product ranges use a palette of 3-7 colors.

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ionfish
I just make them up. They don't come "at the drop of a hat"; it takes time and
a lot of hard work, usually. Often there are false starts and wrong turnings.
One site design I did a while back went through four utterly different designs
before I was happy with it. Sometimes that's just how it is; usually things go
a little more smoothly.

Usually it's art that I draw from, rather than the work of other designers--
Rothko, Hokusai. Recently I saw an understated gem of an exhibition: Vilhelm
Hammershøi at the Royal Academy. I would love to incorporate some of his
subtle tones and textures into something.

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jwesley
I usually pick a theme I want my site to have, like "education", then do a
Google image search for the term to see how others have represented it with
color. After getting a basic idea of what color I like I hand it off to the
designer with very general suggestions. I have learned this is one area I am
better off delegating to someone more talented.

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Zev
I generally pick a main color i want to use and pick colors that are on either
side of it in the color wheel (Also that are similar in brightness and so on)
if I don't want a monochromatic site.

Or if I'm at a loss, i have this widget:
<http://www.colorschemer.com/galleria_info.php>

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jmtame
on hndir.com, i basically got my inspiration from the textmate editor theme
"Blackboard." many of them can be found here:
<http://wiki.macromates.com/Themes/UserSubmittedThemes>

i guess after a while, you like black as a background so much that it creeps
into your projects ("black's da new white, yall!").

our next project, which we should have ready in march, is also themed the same
way. dark background, neon'ish colors. i need to get over it. there was a
phase i went through where everything was white and blue. i honestly have no
idea where i get these fetishes (fetishii?).

but yeah, great artists steal. anarchy has no rules, so declare a form of
government and go ballistic ("maybe wrong in YOUR country, but in mine, which
i happen to login via root, it's perfectly acceptable.")

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juliend2
Try to define the subject of your branding. It your logo is a monkey, for
example, find some photos of monkeys and pick the colors. Make a palette of
these colors and see what is matching well.

Hint : it's good to mix some cold and warm colors. Try to keep some white
space (or at least, light tones).

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known
I prefer Black and White as <http://mobify.me/> does.

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psyklic
I ask myself what I want a user to "feel" when they visit my site. Then, I
choose basic colors which elicit that feeling. After that, I look at different
color schemes to see which complementary colors I like (this part is mostly
subjective).

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mixmax
I found these by by asking Google:

<http://colorschemedesigner.com/>

<http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/top>

but found them pretty wanting..

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andhapp
Has anyone ever tried Adobe Kuler. It has a lot of themes put together by I
guess designers. I admit some of them are awful but it gives one an
opportunity to see how different colours complement each other...

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unalone
I just kind of go into it intuitively. I guess you could call it synesthesia,
but that's a bit overwrought a description. I pick colors that feel right and
jiggle until it comes together perfectly.

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daltonlp
Oh I would definitely hit up <http://www.colr.org> :)

...unless my project IS www.colr.org.

Then I stick with white and gray.

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timcederman
I used <http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php>

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omarish
I like to check out wordpress themes.

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diN0bot
ask a designer (-:

