by AJ George
Over the last few weeks we've delved deep into color. We've covered how color affects mood, enforces learning, and how to use color to design for special needs like colorblindness, dyslexia, the elderly and other cultures. This week I'm going to wrap up the color series with a few free, useful (and fun!) color resources to aid in your design process. Color Resources
http://kuler.adobe.com/ I am in love with this site. Beyond use in design, sometimes I check it out just for the eye-candy of color. For serious color fanatics, Kuler by Adobe offers the ability to peruse top rated, beautifully designed and named color combinations made by fellow color fanatics. Feeling creative? You can also make your own color combinations and add them to the community for rating and discussion. This is an easy way to get boatloads of inspiration or to see how color combinations are received by other color lovers before you implement them in to your eLearning design.
http://www.goffgrafix.com/pantone-rgb-100.php Know of a Pantone spot color you'd like to use but not sure of the RGB or Hexadecimal color value? Use this resource from GoGraffix.com for a massive selection of Pantone colors and their RGB and Hexadecimal color values. Beyond Pantone conversion, this is an excellent way to see a very large spectrum of colors laid out all in one place.
http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html Maybe you know one color for sure that you'd like to use but have no idea where to start before selecting the other colors. Try entering the RGB or Hexadecimal value into the online color schemer where a set of 16 coordinating colors are automatically produced based on the color you have entered. You can also lighten or darken your color scheme with the click of a button. If you don't have an initial color in mind you could instead choose from the pre-populated color palette to help get you started.
http://www.colourlovers.com/photocopa You'll need to create a COLOURlovers account to play with this tool, but it's free and definitely worth it! Import any photo from the web or your flickr account and this tool will design a color palette inspired by the photo. If you don't have a photo already in mind you could also peruse the PHOTOCOPA gallery for inspiration.
http://www.colourlovers.com/copaso/ColorPaletteSoftware If you're looking for a more advanced solution for creating color palettes, try COPASO which is like a combination of PHOTOCOPA and the ColorSchemer. This tool is also offered by COLOURlovers and like the previous tool you'll need to create a free account to use it.
http://www.purveslab.net/seeforyourself/ Want to see for yourself how certain color combinations can play tricks on the eyes? You can waste some time learn a lot by exploring the color examples from Purves Lab and reading up on the empirical explanations for various color tricks.
Do you have any color resources or experiences you'd like to share with your fellow designers? I would love to hear from you! Feel free to add to this list in the Comments area below.
Click here for Part 1 of this series, How Color Affects Mood.
Click here for Part 2 of this series, How Color Affects Learning.
Click here for Part 3 of this series, Using Colors for Special Circumstances.
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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Writer and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials." You can follow AJ on Twitter at http://twitter.com/andrayajgeorge.
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