So I've been spending a bit of time developing logos here at Rockfish lately, and one thing that's challenging is not only defining the company by a single mark but also determining a color scheme that compliments it and is both usable on the web and in print.

I've done some research(googled and iphoned it) to see what is available out there for designers to aid in this process and there are several such as Adobe's Kuler tool and Firefox's add-ons Colorzilla, and Pallet Grabber. All of these are great as tools and guides but I was looking for something a bit more custom. I came across an article on http://www.standardsforlife.com/color-scheme-exercise/ that talks about a very creative process for coming up with your own custom color pallets.

The steps are easy:
1. First you just grab your camera go outside or inside and start taking pictures of things, anything, everything it doesn't matter.

2. Then once you have a few you like take the pics into Photoshop and run the filter pixelate on them (it seems crystalize works best for this, mosaic seems to do a good job but it desaturates the color a bit.)

3. What you are trying to do here is isolate blocks of color to create swatches from.  Then build your pallet isolating 5-6 colors to us.

Here is my example from a picture I took this weekend in Hot Springs:

I've spent some time lately Designing for companies whose primary colors were Blue and I must say, Blue is a color I like on the web. I get frustrated with greys and browns that end up on the clients end being completely misrepresented as something that obviously doesn't help the design, from their remarks. However, Blue seems to be a color everybody likes. Psychology will tell us that ask just about anyone and their favorite color is blue. We do live in what seems like a blue world: From a spectaculr photo from ISS, or the website of a man who says he represents American Democracy (Obama - http://www.barackobama.com) right down to the opening window of my Photoshop. It's all Blue dabade daba da.

We all hear about the 256 web safe colors and last time I checked blue was on there. So how many sites out there use blue? 1000's maybe even more. I noticed the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/) just redesigned their site and their color of choice, Blue. Some other sites that use blue and it works well are: http://www.bartelme.at/, http://www.thinkswedish.com, http://emanuelfelipe.net/. 

So what does this tell you designers stop using Blue? No, if it works why fix it. But use it sporadically, I mean you don't want to show your portfolio to an Interactive Agency and it's full of Blue websites. You know its bad when the guys that live in the grey world(programmers) call you out on it. I tend to only use blue when the client absolutely wants it. If you are going to use it use something other than Hex:0000FF please! If you want to learn more about the color I'm sure you could find a Physchologist or Marketing person who could talk till your blue about how it makes people more productive or even feel better about themselves.

While researching the color Blue I did find a shade that's called electric indigo that I want to try in a future design.

Some Sites that I have used blue in the design are: 
http://www.livebetterindex.com/
http://checkoutblog.com/
http://otcsafety.org/