I have been playing around with a color swatch creating tool. I am trying to figure how I might possibly use this for client presentations or perhaps even in the design process. I was thinking it might be fun for a reverse engineering approach to garden design (is that possible?) I am not sure, but the results are fun anyway….do you think it is useful?
I am a little frustrated with it….it misses some colors. Like with this one, it doesn’t capture the purple…probably because there is relatively little of it…but to me that is the best part.
image by clive nichols
image by clive nichols
Do you use anything like this? While novel and fun…I am not sure it is terribly useful to me….
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The are several interesting colour combination tools online. The problem we see is that colour in nature is by no means an exact science and colours on a computer screen bare little resemblance to colours in the real world.
Marina Berger
I agree Marina, I can’t tell you how many times I have had a client asking why their pink flower isn’t the exact shade of pink that was in the picture that I showed them. I was playing with this tool because I thought maybe if I started with the flower/ plant first, then using a tool like this, I might be more able to coordinate accessories like furniture fabric, pots of whatever… recognizing that of course the garden just doesn’t work like my living room…in the garden it will always change and be different where as if my sofa doesn’t look good with my wall paint today it never will….
I do use an app on my iPhone called “myPANTONE.” I use it mostly if I want to coordinate the colors on my blog to certain colors in a picture. It isn’t a perfect science. Most of the time when I add the selected color to my blog it looks a lot different than it did on my phone. I normally have to do some tweaking until I get the color I was looking for.
It’s fun in a nerdy kind of way.
I use Adobe Kuler for similar reasons – check http://kuler.adobe.com/
Discussing similar topic on my blog a week or two back:
http://mcquegardens.blogspot.com/2010/02/somewhere-over-rainbow.html
I LOVE this tool. I used it here to think about colors for a painted element in the garden. What better way besides bringing the whole yard to the paint chip aisle? Best for inspiration than matching, but still.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21160250@N04/4331280276/in/set-72157604490235172/
I use Kuler too, and I think tools like these are helpful as a starting point, especially for matching furniture — I hadn’t thought of that at all! For me, there’s nothing more helpful in combining plants themselves than photos of actual plant combos, and I’m forever dogearing books and magazines with examples I like. Even then, light has such an effect on color that sometimes it’s hard to really see until you can play with color components in the flesh.
We look at our colour schemes and ideas as concepts and like any concept there may be some variations and changes made once you come to final execution. Sometimes mother nature puts here two cents in as well!