How do you choose your colour schemes for your applications and/or web designs?
Is it a gut instinct thing or can logic be applied here too? I have looked at some colour theory but my combinations seemed wrong.
I am looking at a monochrome webpage. Rather than pluck colours out of the air as usual I would like to see if there is a science behind this. Links and opinions welcome.
Use the system defaults for applications. That's where the user sets THEIR preference, which you should honor.
It is a science and an art, and a big one. 61,000,000 results on google for "color design".
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Kuler is a great utility for choosing color schemes that work in harmony.
I have someone else who lives and breathes color and design do it for me.
Most graphic designers make terrible programmers, and most programmers make terrible graphic designers. So I dodge the issue entirely.
To be totally honest, I usually rip off someone elses color scheme for my own personal stuff (for work stuff, hire a designer). I will grab the main color and complimentary color from a site I think looks nice, plug those into one of the hundreds of online color tools out there, and build out a pallet. Once I have the colors down, I will do a few subtle gradients in photoshop, and just sort of go from there.
Colourlovers: http://www.colourlovers.com/
Or just look around. Go around your town with a camera, take random pictures and pick colours. Good places are the fruit section of a market, park, etc.
I bought a designers/printers reference book that contains pre-defined sets of colours and tones. It includes the RGB values for the colours so I can put them directly into my apps.
The book contains sets such as "contemporary", "autumn", "winter", "cool modern".
Usually I'm told what to use.
If I'm not and have a logo or an image and use this Colors Palette Generator it lets you upload an image and then gives you a generated colour scheme.
If nether I borrow something from around the web.
Your public library should have a copy of the book Color Index which contains various color combinations which work harmoniously. Also, you could look into purchasing a Color Wheel from your local art supply store. It's not expensive, it lets you play with mono, complementary, triad and tetrad schemes. The Color Scheme Designer site is also very nice.
Another alternative is colorcombos.com, which can grab colors from any website. You can browse its library for different combinations or try to change them, then make yours.