This week, I have been reading The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin (known fondly in the development community as Uncle Bob). As may be indicated by the title, the book is written with a focus on programming and advertises itself as "A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers," and while I will say I'm guilty of skimming over certain paragraphs when they got too technical, I think there is much to be learned from this book by anyone in a professional field. The Clean Coder offers incredible insight on professionalism, time management (I especially enjoyed the concept of focus manna), client relations and above all else, craftsmanship.
Fortunately, you don't have to use the techniques mentioned in the last post manually - there are a lot of really excellent tools available online! Here are some of my favorites.
http://www.colourlovers.com/ is a great resource for specific colors, pre-arranged palettes and even patterns.
http://colorschemedesigner.com/ is a great tool that will create harmonious palettes FOR you when you choose a starting color.
http://design-seeds.com/ is a nice anthology of pre-made layouts based off of professional photographs or nature.
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/ offers a tool to create custom palettes based off of any online photo you would like to link. Nature photos tend to produce very nice results.
http://0to255.com/ have you found a color you like? This site will show you all variations from lightest to darkest. Great for creating analogous sets.
Understanding how to manipulate color and create harmonious combinations is an important step when creating design - web, print, or otherwise. So let's get down to the basics:
Types of Colors
Primary Colors
Primary colors are those that cannot be created through mixing other colors. These are the building blocks of a multitude of other hues. There are three primary colors: Red, Yellow, and Blue. What happens when you mix two primary colors together? You create:
Secondary Colors
Which include Orange, Green and Violet. Mixing two secondary colors together will yield:
Tertiary Colors
Such as Yellow-Orange, Red-Orange, Blue-Green, Yellow-Green, Red-Violet, and Blue-Violet. There is much more diversity in shades to be found on the color wheel than these 12 values, but more on that in a moment.
Harmony
When choosing colors for your design, your goal should be to create harmony. A lack of harmony will reduce your design falling flat and boring, or leave the eye with a chaotic mess to interpret. Here are the common methods of choosing colors that will flow harmoniously together:
Analogous - colors which fall next to each other on the color wheel, such as green, yellow, and orange.
Complementary - colors which fall opposite on the color wheel, bringing balance. Example: Yellow and Violet
Split Complementary - this technique works similarly to choosing complementary colors, only instead of choosing yellow and violet, you would choose the two colors analogous to violet - blue-violet and red-violet.
There are other methods to choose palettes (triad, square, etc.) but we will stop here for now.
A few other things to consider - some colors are considered cool (blues, violets) while others are considered warm (reds, oranges, yellows). You can also alter shades by changing them in value (lightness or darkness - essentially, adding black) or intensity (saturation - adding white). Cool and dark hues will tend to recede to the eye while warm and brighter shades will be advancing.
