Color and I have a bit of a love hate relationship. I tend to design somewhat ‘darkly’ yet I find really strong and strange colors to be incredibly powerful when used correctly.
I find color in the strangest of places and I almost always pull color inspiration from nature. If you look more close at the world around you, you may notice that sometimes very unnatural colors have always been in front of you.
Just take a photograph, zoom it in, and you may be surprised.
One of my favorite tools for creating color palettes is Adobe’s Kuler – it’s one of the few color tools I’ve seen that lets you really hone in on triad, analogous, and compound colors – the basics of color theory, and something that most design software lack.
Kuler is so addictive and any time I need a break from my regular design work, I’ll go in and play around with color. In the many palettes that I’ve created over the years, here are some recent ones that I’m enjoying (for the time being) and to promote the use of The Gimp and Inkscape, I’m supplying Swatch Palettes in ‘.gpl’ format.
Feel free to use these. To import them:
Gimp: save them to your ‘palettes’ directory in the Gimp folder
Inkscape: save them to your ‘share/palettes’ directory in the Inkscape folder
So in no particular order here they are. Oh wait, it’s ABC order…
Aurora Lite
Crab Nebula
Eyes Closed
Nontoxic
Rough Speech
With Earrings
With Lace
With Pearls
See, I’m not always so dark! Enjoy, and let me know what you think or if you ever find a use for any of them.
I'm Brad Cooper, a user experience designer and front-end programmer with a passion for actualizing visions. I strive to create a piece of art in each site that I put together both visually and technically.
