Stuck for inspiration
Posted in Design on: Monday, July 4, 2005 by Paul Boag
I received a brief today that required some mock-up designs to be produced, however the brief made no mention whatsoever of design. There was no logo, no colour palette, no style guide, no likes or dislikes… nothing! There is nothing worse than a completely blank canvas. My trick for dealing with it is to start with colour.
Colour can be a powerful influence over a design. Colour can dictate mood, style and even choice of imagery. That is why I find it a useful starting point.
All I had to go on was what the organisation did and the area they worked in. They were a government body that helped to rejuvenate towns in the south west of England. That was fundamentally all I knew.
Now fortunately, I live in the South West of England (Dorset). I have many relatives spread out through Cromwell, Devon and Somerset and could refer to family photos for inspiration. A quick walk around my hometown also helped, as well as getting some fresh air into my lungs!
This trip around the area either virtually (using my photos) or physically (by walking around town) helped me to pick up certain characteristics. These included; the coastline, the rolling countryside and the soil (especially in parts of Somerset where it stains everything red even the bricks of the buildings). Suddenly I had something to work with which eventually led to this basic palette
So what is the morale of this story? Do not sit staring at a blank screen. Get up, look for inspiration offline and approach the problem laterally.
2 Comments
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Often times when I have nothing to work with I will start with a color palette as well. Lately my method of choosing a color supply has been using a combination of The Stock Exchange and Colr.org.
I will browse around the images on the exchange, and then once I’ve found an image that I feel caputres the feel of the project, I will use Colr’s ability to generate a color pallete based on an image. One of the reasons I like Colr so much is that after I have found the right colors for use on the project, Colr will generate a Photoshop color palette for me, so all I have to do is open it with Photoshop and start creating blocks of color and seeing how they interact with each other as solids rather than pixels in an image.
Try Color palette generator .
You have very nice color suggestions in a second.
You can check the color palettes generated using this tool at http://www.featurepics.com/Editorial/Color-palette.aspx
Color generator creates harmonious color palettes
I selected randomly, 2 images from our main featurePics categories to check the results.
I would say – I will vote for all color schemes generated by this great tool.