by Karina Beattiger 23.April 2008 09:58
This is the most awesome thing since (gluten-free) sliced bread. Even the one with raisins in it. (Definitely better than anything made with rice-flour, I'm just saying...) I found this little bit of heaven while I was running through the various links I've collected on del.icio.us. I have a habit of browisng idly, tagging something, organizing it, then forgetting to read through it, so there's a handful of stuff I haven't checked yet and mentally marked for "later reading".
One of these sites is the Peachpit reference Creating Inspired Design, written by (of course!) Andy Clarke. I bookmarked this thing months ago and forgot to check back on it to actually, you know, read it. Having some free time of late as I recuperated from an illness, I've given the article a thorough reading and came across this so-cool-I-can't-handle-it site featured in the article: Bermi Ferrer's Color Scheme Generator.
To use the generator, which searches through various Flickr feeds, all you have to do is type in a word that describes the feeling or the idea of a photo. Try words like "vivid", "regal", "soft", "muted", "bright", "gentle, and so on. (Probably not all at once!) Wait for the feed to load, and then voila! A handful of usually stunning images, and twelve colors pulled from the photo. Oh. My. Goodness. It's like heaven wrapped in search engine. I'm so excited about this (extremely belated, but hey, all my discoveries are!) disovery that I can hardly keep myself from spreading it around like a warm, particularly fuzzy blankie.
The reason I love this concept is two-fold. Firstly, when I muck around with colors, I do so blindly and without much forethought. I think of whatever it is I'm trying to convey, then slap on a square in a color I like, and add some others that go with it. Not, you may think, the best and brightest way to go about it. (A vaguely related aside: Did I mention my design for my own site will be seeing yet another overhaul soon? Yeah, days after finding this link, I decide I want more colors... go figure...) Secondly, I love looking at photos that other people take. I love the allure of photos that are just pictures of every-day things or models or whatnot, photos that don't seem like they would be inspiring, but when you look at the twelve colors extracted from the single photo, you can't help but think, This all came from that single photo? No way!
Some of my favorites are extremely muted photos that are charming because they're so stark: In fact, a quick search of the word "stark" pulls up a whole boatload of various images (see right, screenshot courtesy of the very generator we speak of). Some are starkly colored, bright colors leaping out in stark comparison to its surroundings, some are stark because they're devoid of color. Others are just "stark" the way a polar ice cap is stark, or a mountain is stark. Whatever the case, there's color combinations I never would have thought of! From pastels drawn from an image digitally rendered to be sunset-bright in a muted landscape to the shades of grey and muted greens pulled from a fog-laden swamp.
These are things that I think my subconscious brain is responding to, but that my thinking brain (on which I rely too heavily, I admit) tends to gloss over with a pithy, "I like it!" Thank you, brain, now shut up and let the other bit speak.
Again, I laden these huge expectations on myself and say one day! One day I shall be so awesome that I will be able to dissect the colors in every photograph, piece of art, real life visual, etc. But then I think... Wait a minute. Why should I? Why should I train myself to respond to the clinical view of the world, see the trees and not the forest, when this little gem of a tool here can do it for me? Leave it to myself to respond viscerally to a photo or thing, to like or dislike it on its own principle, and I'll let this tool do the rest. Later, when I extract the colors, I can think, Ah ha! That's why it looks so harmonious!
So! This is my new favorite toy, and I thought I'd share it with everyone who, like me, hadn't yet wandered on over to articles that haven been out for months. A year. Whatever! (Don't judge me...)
Enjoy, have fun, try not to, you know, spend hours on the job writing search terms into the finder just to see what you come up with. (Psst, try "regal". "Regal" is a great one!) Then again, if your job is to be creative and inspired, then why not? Indulge!