Selecting Your Color Palette

To see what colors are trendy, start looking in stores, on popular products, clothing, magazines and advertisements. A great place to check out is the Pantone website. Every year Pantone, the world renowned authority on color and provider of color systems, recognizes a specific color of the year and a color palette. Pantone bases their suggestions on current fashion trends. Check out these colors at pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2022. Not only do you want to select a color combination that is popular now, but consider what colors might be popular a few months from now, especially during the distribution of your book. Another great place to find inspiring color palettes is by looking at different historical periods and art movements. Impressionist painters used a palette of warm, light-filled colors, while the Post-Impressionists used dramatic, unexpected combinations. Artists of the Art Nouveau movement used a lot of tints of hues creating soft, earthy colors, which greatly contrast with the bright, saturated hues of Pop Art. You can also use an online color scheme generator such as the Adobe Color CC palette generator tool at color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel. It will allow you to experiment with various color combinations. Keep in mind, you are viewing these colors online and the colors will not match exactly to the screen when printed. Use the online generator ONLY for inspiration. If you find a combination you like, select close matches for your actual palette colors from the Walsworth Formula Colors. This will ensure your final printed colors are what you expected. The Walsworth Formula Color brochure can be found in the Planning Kit. Be sure to write down the Formula Color numbers for the 3-7 colors you have selected for your yearbook. Editors should place these in this year’s style guide and make all designers aware that they need to use this fixed palette throughout the book. Here are some sample color combinations to help you get started, but try coming up with your own schemes using the Walsworth Formula Colors.

Photo by Monica Garcia

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