Whether your interest in color is based in simple inspiration or a desire to track trends, we’ve rounded up eight online color resources to help you out.
Eight Online Color Resources
Pantone. Pantone is nearly synonymous with color. For more than 50 years, Pantone has provided color matching services and color intelligence reports.
Each year, the company causes a stir in the creative community when it announces the Color of the Year (typically, the first week of December) and shares it’s Fashion color reports. These reports are incredibly helpful to creatives who rely on trend forecasting to stay ahead of the curve. Oh, and the Pantone accessory shop is pretty fun too.
Design Seeds. If you’ve ever surfed Pinterest (and if you haven’t, who are you?), it’s likely you’ve come across Jessica Colaluca’s work. In Design Seeds, she has one of the most simple, yet beautiful blogs devoted to color.
Each entry on her site is a simple celebration of color consisting of a single photograph, with an accompanying color palette. It’s a great place to find pre-prepared color inspiration for mood boards and upcoming projects. Find daily inspiration by following her @designseeds on Pinterest and Instagram.
ColourLovers. Is stocked with thousands of color palettes and patterns uploaded from users around the world. What really makes the site unique, is the category breakdown for fashion, home, craft, wedding, etc.
The idea is that it’s a one stop shop for identifying color trends in each category. The projects posted may not be the most trendy, but the opportunity to see colors in terms of a relatable medium makes this a great site to check out.
Let’s Chip It. Sherwin Williams paint company has developed a fantastic app that allows you to plugin ANY photo from the web to develop a color chip set. Check out this quick chip made with the promotional image for last year’s Door Decorating Contest.
This tool is FANTASTIC for home DIY enthusiasts looking to take abstract color inspiration to reality. Create your color chips and take your custom palette into the store to pick up paint! Genius.
CSS Drive Image to Color Palette Generator. Meant for web designers, this site also allows you to generate a palette of colors from an uploaded or linked photo.
While the site’s design is basic, it does provide specific hex codes light, medium and dark color palette, which is handy when the colors show quite as you’d anticipated. If you’re looking for color inspiration for an updated website, this is a great resource.
Sensational Color. Kate Smith is a well-known color expert and trend forecaster, who works with Fortune 500 companies looking to engage consumers through color. Her site is chock full of useful articles and color resources.
Kate’s articles are short and provide great tidbits of information, but I really like to follow her Pinterest account. Each of Kate’s Pinterest boards are organized by color.
The Perfect Palette. A resource for weddings and parties, The Perfect Pallet is filled with stunning imagery organized and categorized by color.
From styled shoots, to color tips, The Perfect Palette is all a great source of inspiration for creative and colorful styling ideas.
Adobe Color. Play around with Adobe’s color wheel to create an inspiring palette or browse through hundreds of thousands of user generated color schemes.
You can download the palettes as exchange files for use in the Adobe Creative Suite products.
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