How to Find a Colour Palette

Colours are the first thing customers notice about your product so they are undoubtedly important. However, choosing a few specific colours that work well together for your project can seem like a huge headache of a task.

That’s why I’ve decided to ditch the complicated colour theory lesson, and instead, share with you my simple method for finding beautiful colour palettes for a creative project.

The most important things when choosing colours for your products is to be limited and consistent. Choose a palette of 3 – 5 colours and then stick to using these in a rough 60:30:10 ratio. 60% is your dominant colour, 30% is your secondary colour and 10% is for accent colour. Keeping a balance like this will make your designs look professional and appealing.  

In this lesson you’ll find a selection of resources that will make it super easy to pick out colour combinations that work well and will appeal to your audience.

Resources For Finding the Perfect Colour Combinations

What follows is a list of resources and tools that will help you to pick out appealing colour palettes for your projects. Simply click on the image, explore the trending palettes and get inspired by all the beautiful colour out there.

1. Design Seeds

Jessica, an artist and designer, created Design Seeds to share her colour work. Her blog is a digital interpretation of her sketchbooks and is packed full of inspiring images and colour swatches. This is my go-to resource for most of my creative projects.

2. Canva

Canva have a whole section devoted to colour and choosing a colour palette. There is a wealth of information here from colour palettes to lectures about colour theory. It really is worth spending some time looking through these resources to get inspired.

Also, Canva have gone the extra mile and done the hard work for you by giving you 100 colour combinations inspired by popular photographs.

3. Color-Hex

Color-Hex gives information about trending colours and palettes. Each colour in a palette is labelled with its hex code making it easy to choose a colour for your project.

4. Coolors

Coolors is a colour palettes app and website where you can create colour schemes with a colour generator, organize your palettes in projects and collections, and share your colours as links, images or PDFs.

5. Color Hunt

Color Hunt is a free platform for colour inspiration with thousands of trendy hand-picked colour palettes for you to choose from.

6. Adobe Capture

Some of the best colour combinations can be found in the world around us. Adobe Capture is an app that turns your phone into a colour asset creation machine.

With all of these resources, you’re well on your way to choosing the perfect colour palette for your project.

When you find your colours, record the hex codes on page 27 of the workbook so that you can use them when we come to create our planner later in the module.