Color Inspiration in Everyday Surroundings

Creative inspiration is an essential component of the design process. As designers, we are constantly tasked with developing new ideas and solutions to design challenges. One way to do this is to draw inspiration from our everyday surroundings; to re-examine the places and things that we frequently see with a fresh perspective.

Consider “sampling” your environment for color palette ideas. The process is simple: take a digital camera with you on a trip around your neighborhood to collect photos that can be later referenced. After downloading the photos onto your computer, open in Photoshop or place one of the images into an Illustrator document and use the eyedropper tool and the color library to sample areas of the photo, building a set of custom swatches that can be saved in your swatch library and referenced for future projects. If using Illustrator, create a new color group on the swatches palette from your selected hues, and choose “save swatch library as AI” from the palette options. This will allow you to open this library for reference at any future time.

As a designer, it’s important to constantly collect inspiration that fuels our imagination and stock our idea cache. Often, this is as simple as seeing what is already right in front of us. Creativity can be found in taking something that is familiar to us and examining it from a different angle, which in turn allows us to see a wealth of possibilities that had previously been hiding in plain sight.

Tags: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, color, color palette, creativity, inspiration, swatches