How To Select Eye-Catching Colour Combintations - Part 3. Finding Inspiration

There are so many places to source inspiration for colour combinations, whether it be online, in print or from the surrounding environment. You'll be surprised to find that if you start consciously looking, you'll begin to see colour palettes everywhere.  In today's post, we'll be exploring some of the places you can go to find colour inspiration.

Online

The World Wide Web - what a fantastic source of information and inspiration!  There are so many websites dedicated to colour; it's hard to narrow them down to a few. But here are some of my favorites.

Design Seeds

A fantastic resource for colour combinations, Design Seeds uses photos to create colour palettes.

COLOURlovers

Browse thousands of colour palettes or create your own!  COLOURlovers also helps you keep up with colour trends, plus they have a great blog.

Adobe Colour Wheel

Adobe Colour Wheel is a fantastic online tool for creating colour palettes.

Pinterest

Create a colour mood board and pin pictures that you love onto it. You can then refer to it later when looking for colour inspiration.

Print Media

Magazines are a fantastic source of colour inspiration: I find fashion, lifestyle and design magazines are particularly good for finding colour inspiration. Here are a few of my favourites.

Surrounding Environment

Whether you live in the country, by the sea or in the middle of a bustling city, the environment that surrounds you is packed full of colour inspiration. From nature to man-made structures, photograph whatever catches your eye and use the resulting images for colour palette inspiration. There are online colour palette generators that can help you to create colour swatches from your images (like Pictaculous), or use imaging editing software like Photoshop to make your own.

And don't forget to share them with others through social sites like Pinterest, Instagram or Tumblr.

To Sum it all up

• Search for colour inspiration online via websites and social sites.
• Find loads of inspiring colour ideas through magazines and other print media.
• Look around where you live for colour swatch ideas; keep a record of them by taking pictures and creating swatches.

And that is the end of our series!  As always, if you've found this post or the series useful, please be sure to let me know in the comments below, and feel free to share it with your fibre-loving friends.