10 Color Inspiration Secrets Only Designers Know About

Monday, October 23, 2017

10 Color Inspiration Secrets Only Designers Know About

“Color: what a deep and mysterious language!”

Specific hues can provoke different emotions, associations, and responses that affect how your brand is perceived. Put simply, color choices can make or break a design. In fact, research has shown that color can increase brand recognition (by up to 80%), memory, engagement with a design piece, text comprehension, among many others.

Fortunately, we are far from the times when our color choices were limited to a small batch of natural pigments. Our options are no longer whatever colors minerals, animals, and plants had to offer. Synthetic pigments and the screen have made our lives increasingly easier, while making deciding infinitely more complex. With such an overwhelming amount of color options, selecting a palette for a design project has become excruciating, to say the least. The Colourlovers community has indexed nearly 8 million user-named colors, while there are over 16 million possible hexadecimal color combinations.
Overwhelmed yet? No need to worry. We asked top designers from the Creative Market community to share their best tricks & advice for creating stunning color combinations. Take note of these 10 insider secrets and bring them into your next Canva project:
^{^[1]} Words from French artist Paul Gauguin
Want to see what Canva’s senior graphic designer, Poppie Pack, can do with color in Canva under 3 minutes? Watch the video at the bottom of the post to find out.

01. Capture inspiration on-the-go.

Callie Hegstrom, the talented designer behind Make Media, suggests: “I snap photos of gorgeous color schemes (like flowers, or sunsets), and later sample those colors directly in Photoshop or Illustrator. It’s also a great way to match text or graphics with any photo you’re working with to make sure your work is cohesive.”
So, if you have a photograph with a colour scheme that you love, sample colours directly from it to make a quick, easy and effective palette. Tools like Photocopa make this technique even easier. Simply upload your image, explore the different hues that make it up, and build a stunning color
palette in no time at all.