When a designer sets out on the daunting task of creating a profile, one always stumbles across the dilemma of colours.
Colours are difficult to do “by eye” because of the vast diversity of standards when it comes to display settings, print-quality and what not. Thus, creating a solid colour palette requires a mathematical approach.
When creating a colour palette, you usually choose a primary colour, and then choose 2-5 supporting colours. This can be done “by eye” or it can be done properly.
The colour circle provides the possibility of retrieving contrast colours through several different theories. The basic common choices are Complementary colours, Analogous colours, Monochromatic colours, Shades and Triad contrasts.
Now these are in theory quite simple, but how do you calculate these values?
In Adobe Illustrator CS3, finally us designers have been given this tool!
By selecting a primary colour, you can switch to the “Colour guide” tab, and voila, a breadth of colour selections beyond par! Just pick the palette most suitable for your profile.
Colourful community
If you are not working in CS3 yet, Adobe Labs has created an alternative web-site for your colour theory workouts. This site is called Kuler and is a wonderful site for those who appreciate the importance of colour selection in design.
This site contains a Create-tool, where you can based on any colour (CMYK, RGB, LAB or HEX), create a 5-colour palette based on the aforementioned mathematical selections.
The mathematical selections of colour can be limited, as they seldom pick matching greys and other modern colour expressions; thus, Kuler also has a Community section where you can design and publish your own custom palettes. This section of the page is a great feature, as you can browse several palettes for inspiration, rate the palettes, and basically just absorb all colourful inspiration you need for your next project!
NOTE: None of these tools help you select proper Pantone colours, so this is still a manual process as the Pantone system isn’t really applicable to a normal colour circle.
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