Color Your World And Your Website
It’s amazing to me how something you start doing for inspiration can become beneficial for clients. Since I was a child, I loved playing with color; primary colors, pastels, warm tones, cool tones—I used every crayon in my Crayola 64 box with the sharpener in the back. In high school art class I studied the color wheel and learned how to make colors from scratch—adding a dash of blue here, a little red there. Later on while majoring in both Fine Arts and Computer Science, I learned the principles behind utilizing color successfully in the digital world, for example how colors are translated on a brightly-lit monitor as opposed to printed materials, which colors are more or less irritating to the eye, and how different cultures view the same color.
I believe people are born with an eye for color, yet learning the basics early and understanding the varying tones of color aided me in honing my skills as a colorist, consequently enabling me to become Beacon Technologies’ resident color specialist. Dynamic color schemas that look great online were hard to find a few years ago, since computers and monitors had limited color space or range of colors available. But as technology advanced, color availability for the web changed too. As a testament to the possibilities of color on the web, Adobe Labs launched Adobe Kuler in 2006, a website for creating and sharing color themes. I first noticed Adobe’s online color tool in November 2006 and I created a few swatches just for fun. A few weeks later when I visited again, one of the color schemes I created, Herbs and Spice was on the first page of the site dubbed as one of the highest-rated, most downloaded swatches. I’ve created more than 100 themes since then, mostly in spurts and always inspired by the world around me. For example, feeling sad stimulated the color swatch, Quiet Cry which maintained the top spot on the Highest Rated page for over a month, and was downloaded almost 100 times a day during its reign at the top. Last summer, Adobe Labs included Herbs and Spice, in a Kuler promotional campaign.Through my affiliation with Kuler, I’ve been able to network with artists and designers from around the world and some are now my friends on Facebook.
Through my use of Kuler, I’ve been able to create outstanding, beautifully colored website designs for Beacon’s clients in various industries, from law to furniture. And I’m not talking about just the standard corporate blue with black font, but chocolate brown gradients, accent colors of green and orange, and easy-to-read charcoal gray or brown text—all of which you can see in my swatch, Furniture and Fabric II that I created and used for the new design of AC Furniture’s website that the client felt was, “elegant and sophisticated.” If you want to learn more about how Beacon’s creative services can improve your site, contact us.
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