Introduction
Colorschemer is an app designed for designers. It does one thing only and it does it well. It allows you to create and share five color palettes for use when designing digital products such as apps or websites. When a palette is saved it is also published to the community creating a vast pool of color palettes to be inspired from. Colorschemer has an http counterpart called colourlovers.com. Combined they make up a community built entirely around the creation and sharing of color palettes.
Getting inspired
The home/default screen of the app is a seemingly never ending stream of color palettes. The tab is called “All Pallettes”. The main goal of the app is to inspire the user by showing the collective creations of the community. This feature can be very useful when coming up with the initial thoughts for a design and how this should “look and feel”.
Creating your own
When you have been inspired by the works of others you can create your own color palette which can then serve as a useful tool throughout the rest of the design process. The app has a couple of methods for choosing the colors carefully. I prefer the “Photoschemer” which allows you to choose colors from pictures using a classic eyedropper tool. That way I can get inspired by beautiful things I have taken pictures of in the past and try to recreate the atmosphere of the picture in five simple colors. It’s challengin but fun. In the picture below I have created a color palette from a picture I took of some ridiculously colorful shoes a couple of weeks ago.
Inspiring others
A color palette can by saved to “My Palettes” to be used as a design tool or just for inspiration. When it is saved it is also automatically published to the community and will appear in the “All Palettes” stream. Other users can then be inspired by your work, and has the option to save it, comment and like as known from other social network/community services.
Personal opinion
Colorschemer is one of those apps created for a niche of users with very specific needs. I happen to be one of those users but I doubt the app will ever become mainstream, useful or interesting to the majority of people. I have personally been impressed with the pure simplicity of both design and content of this app. It is very focused on doing one thing and doing that thing well. I especially find the contrast between the simplicity of the medium (five colored squares in line) and the endless combinations (one iphone pixel can show 16,777,216 color variations) intriguing. I have also experimented with creating recognizable objects in using this simple medium. See if you can find/guess three of them in this screenshot:
Read more and get the app here. It may very well come in handy in the design process we are in the beginning of.
Ronnie