Color: Ways, Theories, Combos, Palettes

I was asked last week where I get my colorways. In the world of color, how do you select a few that work together for your project?

Story time: years ago, a friend’s kid asked her mom, “Mom, what was it like before everything was colored?” She thought black and white TV meant the world was black and white!

Here are places I go to find great color ideas:

Home Depot/Lowes/Ace/Benjamin Moore There are FREE books, booklets, pamphlets, swatches, and strips of color, just waiting for you to take them home and spread them out all over your desk. It’s like a pet store for artists.

Alluminare.com If you’ve read this blog for more than about 2 minutes, you know I’m a huge fan of Alluminare. The website is completely addicting! You can pick a pattern and then move colors around and see how they work together. Better yet, order a color blanket and walk it all around your house to see how the light and your furniture react to certain shades.

ApartmentTherapy.com See what other people are doing in their houses right NOW.

Pottery Barn/PB Kids/West Elm/Crate & Barrel These companies (and others) have FREE catalogs and e-newsletters where you can stare at and look at and peruse and play with their color palettes. What’s trendy in teen decor? Pop open http://www.pbteen.com and find out. What patterns/designs are working their way into homes? Subscribe to Crate & Barrel’s e-newsletter and find out! Even better: GO to the stores. However, having lived in a city that didn’t have any of these stores, I learned the value of online/mail catalogs for finding color ideas a long time ago. After I moved to NYC, I remember the day I stepped off the train at 59th and Lexington and there was the biggest Pottery Barn I had ever seen. Really, it was one of those moments. Ahh…

Magazines, magazines, magazines I don’t subscribe to any except HOW, but I regularly pick them up individually. Good Housekeeping sometimes has “specialty” issues (not sure the real name) that focus on one thing or another, and I recently found one on decor and color. Inside there were multiple colorways, sample rooms, and -hot dog!- they listed the paint brands and names, should I want that color. Glorious! And who has the best decor magazines? Home Depot. No kidding.

Jim Kraus I rarely buy books about color or decor or trends because it changes so fast, and because the books I’ve seen seem to focus on one area, one culture, one climate. The world of art and decor is so vast, it would be impossible to write a book that includes everything. And at $30+ a pop, a book honestly isn’t a good investment for me. (Magazines are much better, in my opinion.) That said, I was given a set of three books years ago, as a college graduation gift, that I still use. Jim Kraus has a bunch of books geared toward graphic artists that are universally good for ideas on color, layout, etc. I have the Idea Index, Color Index, and Layout Index trio. I highly recommend the Color Index for finding groups of colors that work well together (and he gives the CMYK & RGB of each). I do end up tweaking the colorways most of the time, but it’s a great starting place.

These are my little hot spots for color. I know there are a bazillion other ways to find color inspiration out there. I would love to hear where you find yours!