How to Create a Product: How to Create a Color Palette

Woo! Week 2 is here. If you're curious on how to create a custom color palette, there are a few ways to go about this! I'll share what I do but I want to share a few other options that I think totally work and other creatives do too. 

Use a Color Generator 

Yup! Once I discovered there are color generators, I was mind-blown! Keep in mind, I don't have a graphic design background, so this to me made my life easier. 

A few options: 

• Coolors.co 
• Color Adobe
• I personally prefer Color Adobe because you can upload a photo and it curates a color palette for you based off the colors from the image
• You also have a few more color option tones to play with too 

Pick Colors from an Image 

If you're familiar with Illustrator or Procreate then you can do two of the following:

Illustrator 

1. Place your image in illustrator (don't do image trace or anything), create white squares (6 or so) with no fill and then select the eye dropper tool to pick colors from the image. You'll need to make sure your square is selected when you're picking your colors each time so the box itself fills with the color 

Procreate

1.You can also basically do the same thing in Procreate! What you want to do is upload your image in procreate so that it's in your canvas. Once its there, you can hand select the colors and create a new palette. 

2. You can also choose to upload the image and have procreate create a color palette from the image too. Feel free to eliminate any that you don't like or flow very well together. 

Creating Your Unique Palette 

• My favorite way to go about creating a color palette is by picking colors from my own color palette that I made from colors I love. What does this mean and what do you do? My suggestion is to either review your current work and see what reoccurring colors there are, do you use a specific pink? blue? neutrals? If so, continue to use them and add some more colors. What other colors do you love that you didn't realize? The best way to go about this is going through your closet, your home interiors like blankets, what do you surround yourself around? You can also create a pinterest board and pin anything that pops at you and you really love (I always gravitate towards home things like colorful couches, doors, table settings). The idea is to end up with 30 or so colors that have variety. What you don't want is 30 shades of pink or blue or just one color. Try to really get a range of colors and neutrals and then narrow down! 

These are my tips on how to pick a color palette for your product. Feel free to also use a limited color palette which can be 2-3 colors at most. In my opinion, there isn't one way in building a creative business so feel free to explore the options above. If you'd like to learn more about Color Theory, you can dive into Skillshare that has tons of resources on that too. 

As always, have fun & enjoy the process. 

Jo

 

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