Continuing the Labtox design project story…
The problem – A laboratory environment is generally sterile, white, made of flasks, water, chemical reagents, gloves, cold air etc. But Labtox managers are all women and they wanted a more feminine look. The new stationery should communicate their style and personality, what Labtox is to their audience. And they wanted more color. They had enough of their blueish look.
We thought of working with colored undersea illustrations without making it funny or unprofessional. But, what are the undersea colors? Too many!
That’s were Joshua Davis comes in. Why Joshua? Because he says that we don’t have to invent colors or color combinations, we just have to extract them from Nature. Nature is the best color (and color blending) pallete in the world.
We decided to create 5 color palletes of approximately 17 colors each. We chose 4 beautiful undersea images, and also the banner image on the previous post. Then we began our color extraction process as described by Joshua Davis here.
If you want a very simple color tool to rip colors from any gif image, visit this color array tool, upload a gif file and then wait to receive the collor pallete data. Very cool!!!
Here are the 5 images and the resultant color palletes:
I’ll continue the color story in the next post.
Thanks Joshua!!!
Bye.
rocking !
now here’s a few tricks I use… that you should try.
1. open up the image in phototshop and gaussian blur anywhere from 5 to 10, this blurring cause the colors to “mix” and will often produce more harmonious color palettes.
2. screencapture the 17 colors above and run through the same blurring process again. in step 1 you are blurring an image with a lot of colors… here you’re only blurring/mixing the 17 colors – which you can then save out as a gif up to 256 colors… which would be 256 blurs/mixes of your base 17.
I might run this process 2 or 3 times to get a greater range of colors… which are mixes of the base colors I started with.
hope this helps,