• Researching color palettes made by other users or generated by you (I used a bunch of these during my wedding planning daze)
• Generating color schemes from photographs
• (I love the name of and the tool ColorSuckr — check out how it sucked the colors right out of my kisslock change purse!)
  
• Finding color schemes from other websites

The last category is where I found my favorite tool of them all, a simple but useful tool called I Like Your Colors. After last month’s Adora-inspired post on finding color names, I figured this would be a fun way to ring in October’s set of posts.

I’ve already used I Like Your Colors to customize the color palette of my new Artfire shop (er, studio). Artfire allows you to choose from an assortment of preset color schemes or customize your own. There’s not much you can customize, but it’s enough to give me some tie-in between my blog and my Artfire shop. And now for my amusement, I shall demonstrate how.

1) Type in the web address of the site whose color scheme you’re interested in.
Go to I Like Your Colors, scroll to the bottom of the page and type in the URL in question. Click Get colors.

Search field from I Like Your Colors tool

2) Marvel at the display of hex values in use on your site.
I Like Your Colors picks up colors from my website header image as well as from my Wordpress theme.

I Like Your Colors search results

I Like Your Colors search results (from Wordpress theme)

3) Hop on over to your Artfire studio and customize your colors!
In the Edit My Studio section, choose (1) Colors & Themes. Click on the (2) Custom radio button. Select a (3) color for the top navigation bar. Then, set your colors for (4) Primary Font — see below for details on how to do this, (5) Dark Background and (6) Soft Background. Click (7) the Save Theme! button when you’re done.

Artfire's Colors & Themes page

How to set the hex value for your colors (numbers 4-6 in the image above).
Click on (1) a square to set colors for the primary font and backgrounds. A large color palette will pop up on your screen. It’s not immediately obvious that you can manually enter a hex value here, but you simply scroll down to the bottom of the color palette, highlight any hex value that’s already in the (2) text field and replace it with your desired hex value (you don’t need to type “#” first, but you can). Hit Enter or Return on your keyboard, and your color is set! Note that if you roll your mouse over any of the colors in the color palette, the field will automatically populate with that color. So keep your mouse out of the way.

Color palette

4) Click on My Studio in the left nav, and check your work!

NOTE: I use a backdrop image for my studio banner so you don’t see as much of the color customization as you would if you used a regular sized banner, but I like the backdrop image option a lot better because it gives you more control of the top of the page’s design.Similar Posts:

• Name that color!

rainbow lorikeet photo by mrclean1982

This post is inspired by my friend and neighbor Adora, who sent me a note last night in which she happened to say: “My dream job is to name colors… like, colors of paint, nailpolish, lipstick, etc.  My friends randomly point to objects and I tell them what color it is!” I had to pause at that and think: wow, that would be my nightmare job, cuz I’d be like, “Uuuuuh, that one is…dark green with sort of muddy brown undertones. And that one? Oh, that one’s more like bright green, slightly neonish maybe but not really.”

Ya. I’ve always had a hard time being able to name colors that aren’t your basic rainbow of fruit flavors. This I suppose is a rather odd shortcoming for someone who sells items made with fabrics in the most delicious assortments of color! It’s not that I’m colorblind or anything like that. I can see and differentiate colors and their variations, I just can’t recall their clever names!

What’s a girl with such a deficiency to do? Well let me tell you how I cheat my way through it! I hereby present you with…

5 tools to help you pick your perfect color name!

1) Consult good ol’ Crayola!

Crayola.com: There’s Crayola’s own list of Current Crayola Crayon Colors (CurrentCrayolaCrayonColors! CurrentCrayolaCrayonColors! CurrentCrayolaCrayonColors! CurrentCrayolaCrayonColors! CurrentCrayolaCrayonColors! Yup, 5 times fast ain’t easy.)

Crayola.com's list of current colors - an excerpt

Okay, so some of these color names just wouldn’t work in my Etsy shop. Can you imagine: “The color palette on this pillow cover includes shades of inch worm, macaroni and cheese, and a splash of jazzberry jam”?! That’d be nuts! I do love the name “manatee” for that light grey though. :] And indigo, mahogany, magenta and mango are perfectly reasonable color names.

Wikipedia: And of course Wikipedia offers a MASSIVE List of Crayola crayon colors, along with the dates they were issued as well as hex and RGB values. It’s easier to see the colors on their color chart, and the page also includes Crayola’s specialty crayon colors in addition to the standard. Fun!

Crayola colors on Wikipedia -- an excerpt

2) Look it up on — where else — Wikipedia!

It’s no surprise that Wikipedia has its own List of colors that go beyond just the scope of Crayola-made. This page lists colors alphabetically, and by shade! Here are some that start with the letter “E” (eh heh heh):

Colors that start with the letter "e", from Wikipedia

And colors that are shades of green:

Colors that are shades of green, from Wikipedia

3) Find synonyms and related words on RhymeZone.com

I use RhymeZone.com all. the. time. All the time! That’s my dirty little secret, not so secret anymore. Augh! There goes my edge. Sigh. All for the sake of the blog. The blog, I say!! Ya so anyway, RhymeZone’s good for any type of word. But did you know it’s good for colors too? Allow me to demonstrate. “Computer, show me words that are related to ‘green’!”

RhymeZone.com related words search

4) Use HP’s Online Color Thesaurus

The HP Online Color Thesaurus is a cool little tool that lets you enter your starting color and spits out 5 related and 5 opposite colors! The initial set of results is kind of limited, but you can drill down into more results by clicking on colors that come up in the results until you get where you wanna be. You want green, you say?

HP Online Color Thesaurus

5) Get fancy with these two related color tools: Name That Color, and Color Name & Hue

Remember that first green I was trying to describe, the “dark green with sort of muddy brown undertones”? Thanks to some color picking in Name That Color, I’ve figured it out. Avocado! It’s avocado!

Color tool: Name That Color

And the “bright green, slightly neonish maybe but not really” color? Hm…let’s see what Color Name & Hue, which was built based off of Name That Color by a color-blind fella to further identify the hue related to each color, has to say about that. That’s it, it’s chartreuse! Thanks, Color Name & Hue!

Color tool: Color Name & Hue

Am I the only one who comes up short when trying to drum up descriptive color names? How do you choose your color names? Inquiring minds want to know…Similar Posts:

• I Like Your Colors. My Artfire shop does too.