Usable Color Palette Algorithm
15 Nov 2010 - 11:04am
3 replies
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smitty777
2010
Hi all,
Does anyone have experience creating a usable color palette pro grammatically? I have to create a color palette in RGB that must be easily discrimnable and avoids highly saturated colors. I was thinking along the lines of selecting random RGB values, but restricting certain combinations of values. Any ideas ?
Thanks,
Bill
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Try http://www.colourlovers.com/ or www.kuler.adobe.com. Both have the ability to generate color palettes, or even search for existing palettes that use your particular RGB formula.
Unfortunately, Kuler and other sites don't help you much in terms of generating colorblind-safe palettes, neither are they programmatic.
A few months ago I tried desperately to find a way to programmatically generate a bunch of effective, and preferably colorbind-safe color-palettes to no avail. I eventually stumbled across this website/tool: http://colorbrewer2.org/
I used the tool to generate 15 or so palettes that a user could then choose from. Not all are colorblind-safe, but I marked each palette as safe or not, so we could have a toggle in our tool where the user could choose to only view colorblind safe palettes or not. Each palette is a ColorPalette object, with an array of hex values, a title, a UID and a flag of whether or not it's colorblind-safe.
Perhaps the author of the tool would help you find a way to programmatically generate the palettes you require.
Good luck!
Thanks wraevn!!! That was exactly what I needed. Thanks Chris, too. I did try those sites and found some interesting color schemes, although the palettes they produced seemed a bit more arbitrary (and indeed unprogrammatic). IxDA FTW