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How to Find the Perfect Color and Create a Color Palette

“No single visual element has more effect on a viewer than color. Color gets attention, sets a mood, sends a message. But what colors are the right ones? The key is that color is relational. Colors don’t exist in a vacuum but are always seen with other colors. Because of this, you can design a color-coordinated document based on the colors in any element on the page. Here’s how.”

From Before & After magazine. It’s part of their process to collect email addresses so you have to provide an email address to get the document. However, I find their monthly how-to emails often interesting, not pushy.

This article shows a series of basic steps you can follow to take a photograph and extract many different possible color palettes. Picking colors can be hard, especially for business people on a budget. Even with a budget, it helps to know the color picking process if you manage or hire designers. In this case, their article shows how to use colors in one element of a document, a photograph, to then extract palettes from a color wheel. It’s a very good primer on that process.

UPDATE: This document on how to pick colors that work together also works great with an online color wheel to pick analogs, tetrads, and so on. Color Scheme Designer, for example, lets you define an RGB color value (to the lower right of the circle on the left side of their page) and then all its different color relations. Color Scheme Designer also lets you see how your color choices look to color-impaired people. You still have to pick your colors and ensure they work together in a palette, but an online color wheel can make the process faster and easier.

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