Color Inspiration

August 16, 2007

Inspiration came from an unlikely source and it has helped me work with colors that in the past have sometimes been difficult for me to understand.

I was in the store awhile back looking for something completely unimportant when I saw the rows of neatly stacked colors advertising the paints being sold. I knew I had seen those rows a million times but that day it immediately reminded me of a Pantone swatch book, I thought that it would be a great way to inspire color, and it really helped.

While I was standing there I pulled out a few colors and started matching them together which resulted in something different than if I had designed it purely on screen. That was one of the things I liked about having a Pantone guide nearby, you can quickly flip through the different swatches and put them side-by-side to see how they match, or don’t.

Obviously paint samples are limited, they don’t have quite the selection as a Photoshop picker or the Pantone swatch books themselves. However if you don’t have a color guide around it can work as a quick reference and the tangible nature of it can really speed up production.

There is also something to be said about the part Photoshop, or GIMP, will play in the matter. I don’t know that I would really want to use most of the colors right off the sample rack as the final color in a non paint design. It just feels like cheating to me, like someone else is designing the project for me. I did find that even after I used the paint samples as a starting point that it was easier to pick the color in Photoshop that I would eventually use for the project. But even still the final color was something I wouldn’t have previously selected probably because of the different starting point.

Even more recently I came across another form of paint sample, this one could easily be used as a stand-in color instruction sheet if need be. Valspar has started packaging their paint samples a little differently, they are printing a multiple page suggestion guide with a variety of examples of how to mix and match their paints.

Color samples by Valspar: the covers of Red, Orange and Green.

Not only do they show what colors you could mix with other colors but they tell what messages you are potentially sending when you use a particular color.

the same color books on the first page