So, there are colors extracted from a photo. Cool. Now how should I use this colors to have a usable design? Which should be text, link, background? Picking a 5 color scheme you like is easy, making something of it is the hard part.
Color schemes like this look GREAT next to the photo they're derived from, but don't always translate as well on their own to a website/printout/whatever you're making.
That is where a great designer comes in play. Space and color are there to support content not replace it. So if used right you can make anything beautiful. The real problem is people don't spend enough time crafting their color scheme and that is where the really issue is.
Well, all you just said is it takes a good designer to make something beautiful.
The real problem is people don't spend enough time crafting their color scheme and that is where the really issue is.
I completely disagree. I've never left a website because of its color scheme. There's no issue. This blogger is using a gimmick to please casual passer-bys to her blog: taking pretty photographs and pairing a few well-chosen samples from them with a nice name.
These kinds of blogs have bothered me for a while now because I've come to the conclusion that they serve to inspire bored designers by exciting them with this pleasant gimmickry, but never really help past a momentary aesthetic stimulus. I see no actual discussion of substance; process or strategy or how to be this "great designer" you reference. It's a shallow offering. The +50 contrast in her About Me photo speaks for her mission. It's a pretty website, nothing more. Hardly worth praise if you ask me (and I consider myself a designer).
What I have said is often people don't take the time to craft a color scheme. There is a difference between someone who understands the art of web experience and the person who is a coder and understands structure. If you think that major brands aren't focused on the color of packaging and web design you are dead wrong...have you ever heard of the advertising industry? The same philosophy and care should be taken into consideration when developing any website or app.
Furthermore, it was me that introduced Design Seeds to the HN community yesterday as a great resource in my article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3467855, before aymeric posted a direct link. Jessica is an artist that loves color and is simply giving you a "DESIGN SEED" from which to build not just your website but your life spaces from home interiors, events, weddings and all types of space. It was me that brought her here and she doesn't deserve your comments. You want to criticize, come after me.
Additionally she has more than 152,330 followers on Pinterest http://pinterest.com/designseeds. She is incredibly popular and at last word her site has crashed 5 times since this post. She is not trying to make money from this.
And if you were truly a designer you would actually understand.
I'm aware of what color schemes do for businesses, I just don't think the way she presents these is valuable. I also don't doubt she's popular on pinterest. Websites like that and tumblr revolve around anyone who can provide aesthetic beauty because their traffic consists mostly of bored people clicking through pages and pages of stuff they won't remember tomorrow. I do it myself, but I have to disagree that this sort of content is valuable to a designer. It skips past the thinking and facilitates the clicking.
> I've never left a website because of its color scheme. There's no issue.
As you say on your own web site, sometimes you just get it, sometimes you just don't.
Colours do provoke emotional responses, whether or not the viewer realises it, and people do measurably change their behaviour as a result. Legal pads are yellow because it increases concentration. Performers wait in green rooms because it calms nerves. People who wear dark blue suits to interviews are more likely to get hired.
> I've come to the conclusion that [these kinds of blogs] serve to inspire bored designers by exciting them with this pleasant gimmickry, but never really help past a momentary aesthetic stimulus.
Sometimes, a momentary source of inspiration is all you need.
Sometimes, you encounter that inspiration a long time before you find the right time to act on it.
The examples you named (legal pads, green rooms), all of which I was aware of, are rather psychological examples of what I meant by a discussion of substance. What she's exemplifying is a solid strategy for brainstorming color schemes and nothing more. The way she presents her color schemes allows them no function besides eye-candy.
Inspiration that sticks with you for later is observed naturally in a real-life context that makes you remember it, not by demand in the midst of a hoard of formulaic pinterest posts.
Group the pixels into 5 buckets, take the average of the pixels in each bucket and then sort the colors based on the number of pixels in each bucket. Not sure what machine learning algorithm would be appropriate for classification but I don't think it would be that difficult. I'm pretty sure k-nearest neighbor would produce a decent classification if you think of pixels as being in a three dimensional space.
Then assign the color values into your CSS template, voila you should have a design that matches the color palette of each image.
edit: I've been playing with this process and just scaling the image to 16x16 seems to work fairly well for building a palette.
Jessica is freaking amazing at colors!! I did a story today about design that made front page of HN (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3467855) that referenced her company Design Seeds. Design is all about natural associations and the way she extracts colors from nature and light is maybe the most useful developer tool I have come across, as far as color schemes go.
That is because in front of your eyes, HN is blowing a company up. Just talked to Jessica and their servers have already crashed 3 times! Keep pounding her with traffic HN, good on ya! :)
Stupid question: wouldn't the ND ("You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.") part of the license basically mean that you can't use these colour schemes?
IANAL. But I've been told that an abstract color scheme like this isn't covered by IP laws, while a color scheme in a specific context may be considered part of a trademark or trade dress. In either case it would not be covered by copyright, as that license implies.
Someone who knows more about this should jump in and elaborate.
"Your projects" does have a rather wide applicability, I guess :)
That said, I'm wondering what a /proper/ license for a colour scheme should be. If it's a css file (or even an emacs theme), that doesn't seem to be so hard to imagine.
