From my blog entry on the Digital Space blog

It’s the age of the Internet — e-mail marketing, social networking, blogs. So why would you do printed, direct mail marketing? No one reads that stuff…do they? more at Digital Space>>

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One of my work-related New Year’s resolutions is to work on my color selections. I tend to go back to the tried and true of primary colors and clear hues and this year I’m forcing myself to expand my repertoire. A fantastic tool for this is CSS Drive’s Image to Colors Palette Generator. There you can upload an image to generate a color palette based on the image’s primary colors. This, of course, works well when you already have an image that you want to use and you want to create a color palette to complement it.

Lately, though, I’ve started using it at the beginning of a project to help me decide on a palette. I’ve been building a lightbox at iStockPhoto.com with color inspiration (go ahead and use it, too,  if you’re in need of some color therapy). For a recent project I decided that earthy browns and greens would be appropriate. I visited my lightbox, chose a couple of images which seemed to contain the colors I was looking for, and let CSS Drive do the work. Here’s the palette I chose:

Of course, I could just open the image in Photoshop and use the eyedropper tool to pick colors myself, but I find that I unconsciously choose the clearest, brightest colors in the image. Using the generator, I am presented with a much wider spectrum to choose from.

This is the first of a series of color palette posts. Please feel free to use the palettes in these posts for your own projects. And let me know if you have a fail-proof method of choosing the colors for your projects.

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I’ve been working very hard, which hasn’t left much time for blog posts. I’ve decided to start posting quick tips here — the solutions to problems I’ve run across in my work. Some of you are working designers, and these tricks may be helpful to you. Some of you are design aficionados, in which case these kinds of posts may not be interesting , but I’m working up a new feature for you, too, in the near feature.

Problem: You create a JPG image in Photoshop that has the same background color as you’ve specified for your web page. The goal is to make the image background blend into the page, so that the image is not boxed.

The page looks great in Firefox (and other browsers), but when you open Safari, the background colors don’t match. You double check — the hexadecimal codes are the same. What gives?

Solution: Check to see if your Photoshop JPG has saved a color profile with the file. Safari, unlike other browsers, will respect this setting and actually change the colors in your image to match your specifications. It’s pretty sophistiated of Safari, but it’s usually not what you want when you’re designing a web page. Save all of your Photoshop JPGs without an attached profile, and you should fix this problem.

ETA: Here are some example screenshots:

JPG image on color background in Firefox

JPG image on color background in Safari, saved with profile

JPG image on color background in Safari, saved WITHOUT profile

You can see these pages at http://www.leslietanedesign.com/example/ (with profile) and http://www.leslietanedesign.com/example/test2.html (without profile).

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