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Design your own post card and get professional printing with VistaPrint!  From time to time they offer free post card printing along with other marketing samples.  Use it for thought starters in gettng your next marketing promotion started.  Be sure to send your clients back to your website by adding your web URL to all of your printed materials.  Don’t have a website? Contact me for a free web quote!

When dealing with accessibility issues, one request that I often run across is setting colors for varying degrees of color blindness. Many people have some form or another of color blindness that prevents them from seeing color as the rest of us.  Some vision deficiencies make it very difficult to distinguish web colors.

Changing monitor brightness and contrast help, but as a designer I also look for compatible or non-compatible colors to aid these conditions. Complicating the issue a little more…colors render differently between Windows computers/montors and Apple/Mac computers/monitors.

How to narrow down eco-color choices, or any other color choices, either for web, print or any medium where color palettes need to be defined.

Most of the tools I have listed below are for web based hexidecimal color codes, but many of these can be used to help with room decorator colors, yarn color combinations, and many other material matching systems.  There is even a tool that allows you to upload a photo and it will match the colors with the photo.  Others will let you pick a hue or color and it will auto select compatible colors.  Here is a list of just a few: Colorpicker.com,  Colorschemer.com,  ColorPaletteGenerator,  ColorCombos.com, WebsiteColors.com,  ColorCalculator,  ColorBlender.com,  ColorHunter.com, PaletteMan.com, InstantColorSchemes.

Much thought goes into the theory of color and there are many documented articles on the psychology of color and how color influences someone to buy or not to buy. As a web designer, I am very aware of how color affects the end user.  I also want to make sure that l choose link colors and link rollover colors that affect the information flow of the design and how each color used in the design interacts with another.

Next, I will dabble with accessibility color issues…you CAN color outside the lines!

Magnify your creativity!

For those of us in the creative field, coming up with fresh ideas is sometimes an overwhelming task.  Especially if working under tight deadlines.  I always look to nature for starters.  If my clients give me no specific color palette, I may take a stroll outside and put a magnifying glass to some unsuspecting flower or rock.  One can see more detail in something so ordinary and color combinations are so striking that they give my projects a definitive creative edge.  If it is not color I am seeking, just a walk in the fresh air brings a different point of view.  It’s just another reminder to think outside of the box.