January 6, 2010
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.
January 2, 2010
One of the things we most enjoy is doing design for non-profits that we support. This is our new website redesign for The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. All websites eventually get to a crossroads: revise the current website or start over again from scratch? The Food Bank’s previous website was fairly typical: the site was designed a few years ago on a shoestring budget and it worked well for a while. As the organization expanded, though, and as internet standards changed, the site started to become unwieldy. There wasn’t an obvious place to add to the site and the updating had to be done manually, requiring a staffer at The Food Bank to know a sufficient amount of HTML.
This site redesign was inteded to do the following:
- Reorganize the site content to make the site easier to navigate
- Update the look and feel of the site to reflect the level and scope of services that the Food Bank provides
- Integrate the donation form, allowing The Food Bank to add and change form fields
- Add an advocacy form, which automatically sends cause related email to state and local representatives based on the submitter’s zip code
- Create a download management system for Food Bank related information and press clippings
- Include an east to update calendar for the organization
- Install a content management system which allows Food Bank staffers the ability to control all of the content of the site (We used WordPress as the CMS)
According to the client, we succeeded. They say: “Really happy with the site! Loving the CMS – very easy to use!”
This was a fantastic project for us. Not only was it a real pleasure to work with The Food Bank, but we feel that the final site looks great and meets their needs, with the ability to expand in the future. It’s also gratifying to help a local organization that provides so much for so many. To help them in their mission, we gave the Food Bank our non-profit 10% discount and made a donation through their online donation form. If you’re looking to support a fantastic organization, please consider making a donation today.
Happy New Year, everyone!
