Design Tip: Find your perfect colour palette

From the 'Raise Your Game' monthly newsletter

Inspiration for colours in a project can come from anywhere. Images on google, scenes in nature or our own photographs but if you find a colour you really like, how do you get it from there into your projects? This is where one of Adobe's lesser-known tools comes in.

Adobe colour is a free web app which selects a range of colours from your own uploaded images and helps you create your perfect colour palette in minutes.

I worked recently with a client who wanted each of their website pages to be a different colour based on the header image used. It was a beautiful idea and allowed us to make the pages really pop with a different mood for each event they wanted to advertise and by practising on stock images, I was able to show them how to use this tool to link the colours from the digital images to the rest of the page quickly with no time-consuming guessing over shades, brightness or filtering.

Once an image is uploaded to their page, and the tech will automatically pick out 5 distinct colours within the picture. You can move the circles to change any one of the chosen colours.

Now this is where it gets techy. To be able to take any of those colours and use them elsewhere you need to pay attention to the fun little codes below each shade. These are called Hex colours or if you want to get fancy: Hexadecimal Color Values. This unique code is what is going to let any computer or piece of software know this is the exact colour you want.

Yet it doesn’t stop there. Select your favourite colour of that new palette, and head over to their Adobe Color/Colour-wheel and find 4 complimentary choices based on 10 different colour theory options such as: monochromatic, shades, compound and more.

And these Hex codes don't just apply to the digital world! You can take those babies to Dulux and get your very own custom paint shade, exactly as you've chosen.

How will you use Adobe Color for your next project?