Color Resources

Color is wild!

You, a baby: just a bit of red, a bit of green and a bit of blue, stand back! I've got this!

Me, an intellectual: hold on a moment kiddo. There's a lot more to it. Perception is not uniform in that color space you're navigating. And different cultures perceive colors differently, our brain-maps are grown individually, in a context of their own, and it all makes a heck of a difference. Color is out of this world! Even if our brains were all aligned, the retina does a lot of work, with color cones of three different kinds, and sometimes less and sometimes more...

And if you understood a single color (which I doubt you ever can)... these things are deployed in sets, called "palettes" and the way the palettes are combined, the theories thereof, can themselves fill if not a book certainly a pamphlett.

Articles

• How to Master Colour Theory Color Theory 101
• Marketers Guide to Colour
• Color and psychological functioning: a review of theoretical and empirical work
• How the retina works (including, why does violet look a little bit red??)
  • The difference between violet and purple
• Why Monet Never Used Black, notes:
  • Red/orange/yellow are "warm"
  • green/blue/purple are "cool"
  • Warm colors "pop", Cool Colors Recede
  • Tints pop, shades recede
  • Temperature is stronger than tint
  • Temperature can enrich your typography
  • Color relationships add life to graphics
• Why Rainbow is bad for data visualizations (and what to do about it)
  • One of my goals is to make the rainbow color map as rare in visualization as the goto statement is in programming.
  • Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful
  • Poynter: Why rainbow colors aren't the best option for data visualizations
  • Turbo, An Improved Rainbow Colormap for Visualization

↑ "A MacAdam diagram in the CIE 1931 color space. The ellipses are shown ten times their actual size."

from Wikipedia: Color Difference

Tools/techniques for making visual elements color-blind friendly

• 3 Free Tools to Ensure Color Blind-Friendly Designs
• How to Design for Color Blindness

Palette Tools

• Google for "Color picker" and you'll find google includes a proficient color picker tool, including conversion between hex/-gb/cmyk/hsv/hsl
• Color Brewer — for gradients to use on maps
• Paletton — good for picking monochromatic, complementary, adjacent, triadic, tetradic and -ree-style palettes.
• Adobe color wheel — previously "kuler", redesigned and improved
• Duotone — Colorize a background
• Dribbble — with dribbble you can search by color and can see the palette used in an image
• Hue Test — Drag and drop the colors in each row to arrange them by ue order.

And finally

• Wikipedia: List of Fictional Colors ... sure to make your designs Pop!