Color Inspiration From an Unlikely Source

Yesterday I was doing some research on our upcoming home remodeling project and stumbled across a fascinating site that could easily be used for those seeking new color schemes for a web design project. Sometimes the hardest part of starting a new project can be just getting the colors that you want to use nailed down. This site has some great tools that allow you to explore the use of colors in different combinations.

What's different is that this is not a web or graphics design site, but the on-line home of Behr Paint, the company that supplies paint to Home Depot, a major home improvement store here in the U.S. Although the site is put together for those people choosing color palettes for painting projects, the Flash-based tools and sample palettes they use could easily be used for choosing color swatches for a design project that uses digital tools.

The Color Inspiration page has some very nice color palettes arranged into different categories such as artistic, historical, and regional colors but my favorite is the Explore Color page where you can launch a Flash window that allows you to choose a primary or dominant color and then see the colors that compliment the one you've chosen. Or, you can explore different swatch palettes by going to the Inspiration Library to see photographs of rooms or homes painted with different color schemes.

While this isn't your traditional color picking tool, it's a great way to get a jump on choosing the colors you want to use in an upcoming project. You won't get hexadecimal or RGB values for the colors you might wish to use, but capturing the screen and pulling the results into Fireworks or Dreamweaver where you can use the Eyedropper to sample the image and get the values needed for your design should be an easy process.