This Hue's for You!: 3 color palette resources

In case it isn't obvious, I am not afraid of color. This has been a point of consternation for more than one of my professors here at UB (present company excluded), but I just can't help myself! Bold colors make me so very happy!!!

In scenarios where it's appropriate to work with a fairly wide palette of colors, I find the most unified-looking color combinations are ones which purposefully exclude at least one primary and one secondary hue and their surrounding tertiaries. For example, try reds, purples, and blues, add some orange and teal accents, but exclude yellow and green and everything in between.

You can experiment with this and many more ideas at the ColourLovers website. It's a great resource for all things RGB/hexadecimal, plus you can author and store your own palettes and patterns there.

When a design calls for chromatic simplicity, I often have a hard time paring things down. That's when I turn to the Color Scheme Designer for help.

Click anywhere on the giant color wheel, choose one of the palette dials at the top on the left, and then you will get results that pivot around as many as 4 hues (tetrad), or as few as a single hue (mono). The new and improved CSD 3.0 is especially awesome because you can play with your palette in the following ways: adjust saturation and contrast; get detailed hexadecimal information on every color you see; preview how black, grey, or white text will read on top of each color; and even see your color scheme at work in sample "light" and "dark" page layouts. It's super handy!

Finally, Have you ever seen a shirt, a painting, a rug, a room, a garden, a building, or even whole landscape or street scene where all the colors seemed to be working in a pleasing way? Next time it happens, break out your camera phone, snap a picture, and upload your image to Color Hunter. This nifty site creates palettes for you by pulling colors out of your image. They have created a palette database by selecting images from flikr, and you can search for color schemes using keywords or hexadecimal codes. If you sign up, you can also save a library of favorites. Unfortunately, you CAN'T save your own palette creations, but you can always take a screen shot or jot down the codes for future reference. Below is a palette I made from a photo I took of the most beautiful place I've ever seen: A protected (and deserted) beach that's part of the Sian Ka'an biosphere near Tulum, Mexico: