13 Color Inspirations for Your Next Project

Are you looking for color inspirations for your next project?

Only a great color scheme can create a great design. With the clearly infinite number of colors available sometimes it gets overwhelming and tricky to decide on a color palette. But first, let us understand how to take color inspiration from a picture.

Focus on proportion

Apart from looking at the colors, it's really important to focus on the proportion of colors used in the picture. Carefully note the amount of each color used and the visual harmony created as a result. British designer Elena Genova (from mycreativeland) offers some key advice. “I do like the interior design rule that is pretty much applicable to graphic design too: 60% – dominant color, 30% – secondary color, 10% – accent color. If you’d like to introduce a fourth (and so on) color, split the secondary color (or perhaps the dominant but never the accent).”

Focus on placement

Notice the placement of colors used in the image. Along with proportion, the placement of colors is very important. You may have selected the right color palette for your project but it's the placement of color with respect to each other that can make or break a design.

Understand the composition

Look at the composition of all the elements in the picture. Observe how all elements in the picture are interacting with each other. The shapes, forms, and textures combined with the colors together bring out the overall visual and psychological impact.

Use a color palette generator

You can use online tools like palettegenerator or photocopa to pick up and generate color palettes. These are easy tools that generate color palettes from the pictures you upload. They even let you select a particular part of the picture to pick colors from. In palettegenerator you can upload multiple images at once and compare the palettes quickly. Also, it allows you to select the number of colors you want to pick, whereas photocopa lets you pick colors individually and create your own palette along with providing autogenerated palettes like light, dark, muted, chance, analogous and bright.

Pallete Generator

Photocopa

Match it to your theme's mood

If you're already working on a theme or topic, think about what kind of colors go with that. 

What kind of mood is your design piece trying to portray? Then select a palette according to that mood. If your palette doesn't reflect that then you may have to change one or more colors to make it more relatable. 

Here I have curated 13 pictures of diverse subjects full of distinct color schemes that can help you out.

I hope the above tips inspired you to create some cool designs! Do share the links to those in the comment section below for the cult community to have a look. Subscribe to get more posts on color schemes and different tools for color inspirations. Here's a color pun to brighten your day.