Designers find inspiration and motivation from other designers. Everyday on the web we see things that are beautifully made by our peers – work that spark ideas for new projects or teaches us a new technique or technology. Recently, I’ve been trying to pay better attention to designers’ use of color on the web. I’m also working to combat my forgetfulness and feed my obsessive need to cata(log) aspects of my life in a really straightforward manner. While I’m already familiar with great services like Adobe Kuler’s Wheel and Explore tools and Color Scheme Designer, I’m interested in something much simpler, cleaner, and straightforward – HTML on a page with hex color values and ordered in reverse chronological order.
Enter Swatches, a simple way to track sets of hex color values and also give attribution to those designers or sources that help me better understand color and how colors work together in design. Interested in how this works? See it at jsfiddle.
In getting here, I’ve been heavily influenced by dribbble’s design approach to color sets, as well as the attention it gives to color in the designs its users post and share in that space. But I’d like to be able to track sets of colors I find that work really well, as well as the hex color values that make up those sets.
In the future, I’d like to develop a way to make this much more dynamic or work better with Jekyll but also a tool or service that others can utilize. In the meantime, I hope this is useful to people and inspires others to think more about color and using color on the web.