IM Free provides a curated overview of freely available photos, all available for commercial use. All photos are thoroughly grouped and tagged, and usually released under a Creative Commons license. Overall, there are literally thousands of available items which you can use right away. And if you need even more pictures, Gratisography, Unsplash andPicjumbo are further resources worth looking into, with a growing collection of free high-resolution pictures that you can use for commercial and private projects. Alternatively, you could use Google CC Image Search as well, of course.
Author: Sharon Villines
Public Domain Books
Not exactly a website resource but public domain books are something to consider if your site has anything to do with literature or book selling, or you just like to read: Public Domain Books—25 sources.
An amazing array of sites described in an article at Ebook Friendly. Many are archives that include photographs and other materials—good resources for copyright free illustrations.
Favorite WordPress Plugins
If you have favorite WordPress plugins, the ones you use on all your sites, download them to your computer, put them all in zip archive. Then you can upload them and have them all ready to use.
Why a Newsletter Blog?
Newsletters on your website are a better choice than printed or even emailed newsletters. The “issues” or entries stay posted on your website easily accessible for as long as you like. A newsletter on a website can be indexed by search engines to be found by people who never heard of you. Notice of new issues can be sent automatically.
Printed and eMail Newsletter Downsides
Printed newsletters are normally planned for a certain size and length and with special features for each issue—a calendar of events, a cute quote, a joke, a feature story, news items. All these have to come together at once and get to the printer in order to meet deadlines for timely publication. Then they have to be distributed. Mailing is expensive. Address changes difficult to maintain.
An email newsletter with a predetermined format will still have to meet the same content expectations, plus being prepared by someone who understands the format and the software. Most newsletters, distributed in print or by email, have become uneconomical and of questionable value given the amount of time, effort, and coördination they take to produce.
What Exactly Is a WordPress Blog?
Blog is short for Web Log. Blogs began as online diaries in which writers posted their thoughts and opinions with discipline and openness. A serious blogger wrote every day and was followed by other bloggers. For many of the early bloggers, who were writing before the easy to use Web existed, it became both a religion and a science.
WordPress is an online software that began for bloggers to easily write blog entries using a web browser. It is open source, which means available at no cost. It has developed over the years into a “content managing program,” a CPM, which is capable of doing many more things. It is essentially a file cabinet in the Cloud. It exists on a web servers somewhere.
A newsletter blog post is like posting a news item on a bulletin board or to a news feed than preparing a newsletter for publication. It has a singular focus and is relatively brief. (Mine are typically too long!) Posts are added to a website in chronological order but can be searched and sorted in multiple ways, like notecards.
A Blog Post Is Not an Email Message
A blog post is intended for a wide audience and for “posterity.” It becomes part of the historical record, not just an announcement or press release that will be thrown away. They can be published on a schedule or spontaneously. A calendar of events for the next month might be posted on a regular date, and posts announcing births or other happenings as they occur. Posts on special topics can be posted when completed—Planning a Garden, New Lamps, etc.—or scheduled for later publication.
Blogs Convey Continuity
A blog post is part of a continuous process. Each post is a reminder of the last and the next. That continuity is established more easily than with a newsletter because each post is complete within itself but the blog is “never-ending.” Its past is always present.
Blogs Can Be Spontaneous and Informal
With the ability to post frequently, not all information needs to be collected before announcing an exciting event or be copy edited and perfect. It can be one short paragraph informally jotted down. Who wants to know about a baby born a month ago when it can be announced within minutes? So what if there is no name yet? It can be sent when available. Distribution is essentially free so three short posts can be sent as easily as one long. Frequency can be irritating, but sometimes it is a welcome virtue.
A blog post can be quickly written and distributed with little extra cost beyond maintaining a website (which you should already be doing.)
Wordpress
I use WordPress because it is free, well-designed, constantly updated, and used by millions of other people worldwide. I can always find advice. It can be used on your own website under your own domain or on the WordPress.com website where WordPress will host a blog for you. It is easy to learn by anyone familiar with word-processing program and the web.
What the software does is set up a framework for organizing and sharing information. Think of each news item as an individual snippet. WordPress helps you organize each snippet chronologically and by author, title, date, subject, keywords, etc. The snippet can always be found by searching any of those elements.
WordPress also keeps track of subscribers so you can distribute these news items as they are published or weekly or monthly. Any schedule you choose. It does many more things but in terms of replacing printed or email newsletters with a blog, these are some of the main advantages.
Pixels, Ems, and Rems
Website design measurements are not inches or even centimeters. They are pixels, ems, and rems. Rems are new. When I opened the Twenty-Twelve CSS (styling) sheet, I was thrown by the new rem measurement. The first thing I did was delete all of them and used pixels or ems. That messed things up pretty well, until I came to terms with rems.
Pixels
Computer monitors have resolutions in pixels. A screen can be 72 pixels per inch (PPI), 124, etc, etc. To size a font in pixels means it will appear as that number of screen pixels. It’s a constant that depends on the number of pixels on the screen. On my monitor has many pixels per inch, so in Microsoft Word, for example, I view documents at 125% in order to see what the page will look like when I print it. On websites, I often have to increase the font in order to read it.
In addition to different pixels per inch on different monitors, pixels are sized in absolute numbers, Each style on the webpage has to be given a specific number of pixels. Since the styles may take pages of code and pixel sizes range from 36 to 8, proportions of various elements were difficult to keep consistent. And if the size or proportions were changed, each of those numbers had to be replaced.
Then ems came along.
Ems
“Em” is a typographical term that refers to the height of a letter. Other measurements on a page of text, like line-height and the proportions of titles and headings, are measured in percentages of ems. On webs pages the size of an em is established by the website designer for the site or each section of a page or the site. If the base font size is set to 16 px other sizes are set a percentages of the base font size, the em. If the base font is 16px, a smaller font might be set .75 em resulting in 14 px letters. When a base font size is increased or decreased, all the other sizes will change in relation to the base font size.
But they don’t. And there lies the problem.
Measurements, like colors, are established using “CSS,” which stands for Cascading Style Sheet. Styles change in relation to the style above them or in which they are nested in a “cascade.” If the text of a paragraph is set at .75 em, and a quote within the paragraph is set at .25em, the quote will be 25% of 75%, not 25% of the original 16 pixels. With long pages of complex CSS coding, this means sizes can change unexpectedly. Tracking down all the relationships between cascading percentages of ems can take a lot of time—unless you are mathematically inclined and can see the logical (or illogical) flow of percentages cascading on top of percentages. Designers are often not.
On top of that screen sizes began changing. One person would be using an iPhone and another a 24 inch monitor. One person a new retinal display and another a much older 72 ppi screen. Predetermined numbers meant that what was good design on one was unusable on another. Enter rems.
REMs
With the increasing variety of screen sizes and resolutions, programmers began working on “responsive design,” web pages that change according the size of the screen. What can be read on a desktop monitor may be difficult to read on a notebook and laborious on a smart phone. This required either different websites, at triple the design cost, or a web page that would change depending on the device it was being viewed on. Elements had to be able to move around according to the width of screen on mobile devices and the browser window size on desktops. A stable, non-cascading measurement became necessary.
Rem stands for “root em”. Rems work as logically as one expects ems to: in relation to the base font size of 16 px, not the size of the font immediately above it. Current version of all the mainstream browsers and mobil devices support rems, which means they can read them and render a page accurately. As a fall back, however, for those who are not using current browsers, sizes are still set in both pixels and rems.*
More on Rems
A good place to watch for updates on CSS changes is CSS-Tricks which features a blog, forums, demos, gallery, snippets of HTML and CSS, videos, and more.
A (Life Saving) Rem Calculator
And here is a calculator from Foliovision to convert a pixel measurement to rem measurement. Type in your pixels measurement and hit Enter. You will get two results—one for font-size, width, height, margin, padding and the other for line-height.
Responsive Design Calculator: Pixels to REM
*Everyone should be using current versions of browsers. They have better security protecting your computer from worms and viruses and trojan horses, and can use more features on websites. And they are faster. Old version so Internet Explorer are particularly deficient. Those users should definitely upgrade to version 9 or change browsers.
WordCount
About
http://number27.org/wordcount
Was not working April 24 2020
Another fabulous gem from the UK. WordCount is a ranking of the 86,800 most used words in the English language by frequency of use. Presented in the same format as a timeline—a beautiful timeline. Very minimalist and elegant. Perfectly simple. The design itself is worth the effort. You can also use it to analyze the vocabulary on your site—are the words you are using common, if understanding is your goal, or rare if sounding obtuse is your goal.
From the site:
WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.
You can scroll the horizontal line of words or search for a specific word. Very interesting results. Then you can go to QueryCount that tracks the words that people search. Note: A screenshot of those words would be R-rated.
Image Size for Websites
When designing a website, I look again at the latest recommendations for image size for websites, at the best pixels per inch (PPI). This article from PhotoshopEssentials.com (dated only 2013) says, “there’s simply no such thing as a standard web or screen resolution, if your images are destined for the web, you don’t need to worry about image resolution at all!”
Photoshop Essentials 72 ppi Web Image Myth
The old standard resolution of 72 pixels per inch dates from 1984 with the first Macintosh. Today’s screens are more like 100-150 ppi; for retinal displays, 300 ppi. Each monitor will show the pixels per inch that it is designed to show or a smaller number if the settings have been changed. Resolution only applies to print images.
A file with a resolution of 72 will be very small when printed and cannot be enlarged with a satisfactory result. The top dialogue box in Adobe’s Photoshop programs applies to images on the screen. The lower box, where the resolution and size in inches appears, applies only to printed images. Photograph set to 200 ppi will still be 200 ppi on screen whether the resolution is set to 72 or 300, and the file size will be the same. But the photo will print very small if set at 72.
Typography: Modular Scale
Modular Scale sponsored by Typecast is a handy tool for converting type sizes from pixels to ems and beyond. Enter the size of your text in pixels and translate it using one of almost a dozen perfect ratios and the pixels will be translated into ems, ems@16 and %of 13. If you are using rems, this makes it a lot easier.
If you don’t understand any of this, you probably don’t need to. If you want an explanation, please don’t ask me. I have to look up the reasons every time I scale fonts. It’s complicated, arcane, and only of value if you code CSS.
Snazzy Maps
Snazzy Maps is a collection of links to, you guessed it, Snazzy Maps. When a Google Map isn’t enough look a these: Pale Dawn, Midnight Commander, Avocado World, Neon World, and more. A map to match every color scheme.
Can creaate your own map. styles colors level of detail, etc.
Stet: A Writer’s Journal
Stet’s full title is Stet: A Writer’s Journal on Culture and Technology. Many wonderful articles on how writing on for the web.
It is published by Editorially: The Best Writing is Rewriting, a collaborative writing forum.
STET’s goal is to demystify writing by drawing attention to how writing works. To that end, STET pairs good writing with notes that explain what makes writing good.
Topics on STET range across culture and technology, with special attention paid to the intersections between them. We aim to be as accessible and interesting to both practitioners and users of technology. You won’t find insider lingo here; you will find astute, well-written, and nuanced takes on subjects both timely and timeless.
The title pays homage to a discussion between writer and editor, in which one or the other marks a change “stet,” meaning “let it stand.” It suggests both discussion and revision, elements which we believe are at the heart of good writing.
Infographics from Visual.ly
The graphic design company Visual.ly specializes in “visual content,” information conveyed using a combination of images and language—infographics, videos, interactives, presentations. They pull together storytellers, number crunchers, designers, and animators.
Their Infographics start at $999 and are worth every penny. They are delightful and elegant and effective—the magic word.
Their front page is a continuous scroll of their work, which is amazing: Visual.ly. I classified this as fabulously beautiful, partly because it is and partly because it is so unexpected and well-done. An inspiration.
The blog entries explain data visualization: Visual.ly Blog.
Three examples of staff picks:
Simple Design, Short Names, No Ads
Triple Threat Websites are simple, and becoming simpler. It takes time to learn to leave out what people don’t really need to know, but we’re getting there.
Simplifying the Internet
Today’s examples of simple are from a post by John Herrman on the BuzzFeed FWD website. It includes examples of simple design sites and the new attitude: “Welcome To The New Internet: Simple Design, Short Names, No Ads”
These examples are publishing platforms directed at simplifying and redesigning blogs. John Herrman writes:
In recent months, at least four of the most interesting new startups — all either from or backed by people with deep roots in the current internet, including Twitter cofounders and many of the most prominent VCs in Silicon Valley — have been launched to, in some way, replace the internet. Not add to it, or change some part. These sites want to fix the whole thing: to remake comments, content, and updates with little to no encumbrance from the current web.
Simple Blogging Websites
The Perfect Website
The Key Elements
Navigation Guidelines for Better Navigation and Categories
Navigation Guidelines is report on an e-commerce study at Baymard Institute which researches the best ways to improve the online user experience. This was an eight month large-scale usability research study on the product-finding experience—a multi-syllabic way of saying how people do or do not find things they are looking for on the web and how they feel about it. The study tested multi-million dollar websites by the best designers. Amazon, Best Buy, Blue Nile, Chemist Direct, Drugstore.com, eBags, GILT, GoOutdoors, H&M, IKEA, Macy’s, Newegg, Pixmania, Pottery Barn, REI, Tesco, Toys’R’Us, The Entertainer, and Zappos. They found more than 900 usability problems.
While most of these guidelines apply to retail shopping sites, the principles can be applied to any site.
1. Don’t Make Parent Categories Shallow. (Also, Have Parent Categories.)
Use parent categories and child categories. Both should be clickable, not just a list of items. Users expect items in a menu to be clickable and they like to explore.
2. Put the Same Subcategory Within Multiple Main Categories When Necessary.
When a subcategory could logically appear in multiple parent categories but appears only in one, users believe it isn’t there when they don’t find it where they expect it to be.
3. Consider Having a “What’s New” Category or Filter.
Some users want to see what’s new — to be inspired or buying a gift — without having to plow through known products.
4. Suggest Both Alternative and Supplementary Products on Product Pages.
Alternatives, substitutes, add-ons and accessories to the product that the user is currently viewing are often hard to find.
5. List “Recently Viewed Items.”
Returning to a a previously visited product becomes needlessly complex using only the browser’s “Back” button or has to re-navigate the categories or reuse search.
6. Create Dedicated Pages that List Compatible Products.
Users have a difficult time finding compatible products and verifying their compatibility when the website doesn’t explicitly state their compatibility or link to the corresponding products. In other words put matching stuff together with matching stuff.
7. Always Link Contextual Images Directly to the Products Shown.
Users quickly grow frustrated when they spot a product in a front page display image but can’t navigate to it.
GoOutdoThe full article can be found here: Navigation Guidelines for Better Navigation and Categories
Building a Successful Product
Start Small and Listen is web developer, speaker, and writer Rachel Andrew‘s advice in Smashing Magazine. No matter how many articles I have read on business, I find one more that protects me from another bad idea. This one is on building successful products. She means moneymaking products, and that I haven’t mastered but I still want people to read what I write. A nice article.
Building a Successful Product: Start Small and Listen
“The goal of a startup is to find the sweet-spot where minimum product and viable product meet — get people to fall in love with you. Over time, you listen to your customers, make improvements and raise the bar on what viable means — making it more expensive for competitors to jump in.”
– John Radoff, Entrepreneur, author, and game designer
If You Don’t Have a Million Dollars
Environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author, Paul Hawkin author of Growing a Business
Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine is simply smashing. Articles on coding, design, graphics, and WordPress and other CMS programs and software.
Beautiful, helpful, indispensable. An essential email newsletter, a library, workshops, job board, etc. More than I can ever remember.
Just Delete Me
A very useful site for everyone who has tried to close an account and can’t find the link or tires of the 15 questions and clicks required to do it. There are, as of today, 280 links to get out of the soup easily: Just Delete Me.
The ability to get off each site is categorized from easy ( Artsy, Blue Apron, Dropbox) to impossible (Evernote, Gawker, GoDaddy).
Also includes a Chrome extension so you can use Chrome directly.
Confirms that some sites are just impossible to delete your account. Some hard. Some easy. Gives directions.
Gratisography: Free Hi-Res Photos
High resolution photographs from Gratisocraphy by Ryan McGuire of Bells Design. Easy download links in the corner. Look like stock photography but are free of all copyright restrictions and a nice give back.
Typography Tools Online
Nice Web Type is a list typography tools online: tips, utilities, and resources available on the Web assembled by Tim Brown Type Manager for Adobe Typekit. Includes a video of his talk about fonts, the web, typesetting, layout, the tools we use, the information we gather, and the value of graphic design.
Animated History of Typography
This animated history of typography as succinct and clear as possible. Also an animation wonder in that it doesn’t use computer graphics, just simple paper cutouts and a camera. And time.
It took: 291 Paper Letters. 2,454 Photographs. 140 hours of work.
Five minutes. Well-worth the time. If you know little about letters or what a serif is, you will have a more appreciation of all things in print. If you know the history, you will enjoy the animation. And probably learn at least something.
On Vimeo and YouTube
YouTube also has many other videos on typography. When you view this video, look to the right for a list.
Website Design Research: What Works and What Doesn't
Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, has been conducting website design research since 1995, essentially since there were websites. He is the world expert on what works and what doesn’t. Instead of marketing, he focuses on the user experience. Ultimately that helps market information, services, and products, but his focus is not on how to trick the reader into believing you are saying something when you are saying nothing, you will provide services they can’t live without, or you are selling a product they don’t want or need at a price they can’t pass up. His focus is user-friendly websites.
Conclusions Based on Research
Nielsen wants to know how people use websites and what frustrates them.
- Why do employees of companies only find what they want on their own websites 74% of the time? These are sites about a subject they know well and are highly motivated to pursue.
- Why do teenagers, those masters of technology, have an average success rate of 72%, less than corporate users?
- Why do e-commerce users only find what they want 64% of the time? This means e-commerce sites are designed to frustrate 35% of the customers who have already “walked into their store.”
To find out NNg does Evidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting. The NNg website contains dozens and dozens of well-written research reports of the studies his firm has conducted. This is the kind of information that costs thousands of dollars, and all you have to do is read it.
Nielsen is not afraid of detail and he is not afraid to share what he discovers. And he does it in plain English (mostly). He is not afraid to give examples of sites that don’t work. And he doesn’t favor glitz and glamor over clean simple text and readable photographs.
Research Topics
These are just a few of the topics on which you can find reports:
- Credibility & Persuasion
- E-Commerce Design
- E-Mail Newsletter Design
- Information Architecture
- Mobile and Tablet Design
- Web Usability
- Web Writing & Content Strategy
My favorite individual reports —and I haven’t come close to reading all of them or even implementing everything I have learned from the ones I’ve read:
113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability
Top 10 Information Architecture (IA) Mistakes
A free downloadable Report: PR on Websites
Another free downloadable Report if you like social media: Social Media User Experience.
There are dozens more. Or if you like books Nielsen has done several classics. The reason they are classics is that they are the authority and things like human-user interface don’t change very much because humans don’t change very much very fast. We still look around with the same eyes and type with the same fingers and forget which page we were on with the same brain.
Mobile Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Raluca Budiu. 2012.
Prioritizing Web Usability
Designing Web Usability
Nielsen’s books are thick and detailed but like websites are easily browsable. You take them in one page at a time or sit down and read them cover to cover.
If you have any interest in web design, Don’t miss Nielsen’s work.
Book Design
The Book Designer is another wonderful resource available on the web, free to everyone. I was referred to it by Jackie Urbanovic when I asked about alternatives to Adobe’s InDesign. The new edition is only available via the “Cloud” and is very expensive for those of us who do not use it everyday. Something like $50 a month.
Her short answer on InDesign was “no,”but she referred me to The Book Designer by Joel Friedlander, a very useful website for anyone considering publishing a book or designing text. The site also has a free 24 page booklet on self-publishing, 10 Things You Need to Know About Self-Publishing.
Tons of resources here. Many links to other well-selected sites on design and publishing. Topics include writing, book design, planning a book, understanding fonts and typography, print choices, ebooks and ebook readers, and marketing.
Best Book Designer Posts Include:
Understanding Fonts & Typography with nine links to specific topics, including elements of a book page, what goes on the title page with two examples, 5 layout mistakes, and book page layout. One of the nice things about the site is that Friedlander doesn’t overwhelm you with information. He gives from 2-10 examples and moves on. But you can trust those examples.
Five Favorite Fonts for Interior Book Design takes the guessing out of which font to use to make work look professional.
The site also has great comments—don’t miss them.
And don’t miss this site if you are planning on self-publishing anything.
I used his signature as an image because his header is rather undistinguished. The design of the site doesn’t match the quality of the information or the examples given.
Optimum Line Length
In addition to letter spacing and line height, optimum line length, the number of characters per line, affects readability and user experience. A long line of text produces fatigue and a short line of text can be distracting. Seventy-five characters per line, including spaces, is usually the maximum for a block of text with 50-60 being the optimum range. Unless a line is short for effect, such as emphasizing relationships between words as in poetry, readers begin to skip words as their eyes move down the page instead of moving from left to right, because quick side-to-side movements fatigue the eyes.
Responsive vs. Fixed Website Design
Since line length is so important as a fatigue factor, the traditional advice is that web pages should be set to a fixed width rather than being liquid, which means they are allowed to contract and expand. On a desktop computer, a fixed width remains a fixed width even when the window if much wider. With liquid layouts too narrow to read comfortably, readers can become fatigued and stop reading for reasons that have nothing to do with your content. However, since so many people are reading on so many different sized devices now, the new advice is that responsive is a plus.
Designers generally don’t like responsive page design because it prevents controlling the look of the page. It allows graphics to move around and headlines to end up on two lines with word breaks that can change comprehension. A compromise is to have two layouts, one responsive for mobile devices and tablets and one fixed for desktops. (This is almost twice the work.)
The Golden Ration Typography Calculator
A narrow text will require smaller type in order to maintain a line width that is conducive to being read. If you are designing specifically for a device with known measurements, like an iPad, you can adjust type size and line height accordingly.
For calculating the relationship between text size and line length, you can use the Golden Ratio Typography Calculator by Chris Pearson of Pearsonified (Yes, that is the right spelling.)
Golden Ratio Typography Calculator
The Golden Ratio Typography Calculator addresses one of the most difficult aspects of designing a text: to layout type in such a way that it is most readable and attractive. Most typographers and graphic designers have had years of visual experience that allows them to choose the most attractive and readable font sizes, widths, and line lengths intuitively. Even with comparable experience, however, doing this on the web can be a challenge. Chris Pearson of Pearsonified has designed a calculator that produces several optimal sizes and proportions given your preferences or the requirement of a specific project.
Calculating Sizes, Heights, and Widths
The calculator will (1) calculate the appropriate font size, line height, content width, and characters per line, and paragraph spacing; and (2) allow you to choose a font that is set to these numbers in a block of text. It will show you the optimum settings for a given content width, number of characters per line, for your chosen font and size, etc.
For 16pt type, for example, in Hoefler Text the optimum settings are:
Font Size: 16, Line Height: 25, Content Width: 600, Approx.92, Characters Per Line: 85.
In Verdana, these settings are:
Font Size: 16, Line Height: 25, Content Width: 600, Approx. CPL: 74
If you click on the font size, a box will open giving you the optimum settings for headline and primary and secondary text sizes.
You may not agree with the settings Chris finds optimal, but it is an excellent place to start.
Choosing Colors: Color Schemer
If you love choosing colors or you hate it because you never get it right, I highly recommend an inexpensive software program called Color Schemer. It is both useful and captivating. It recommends and allows you to create color samples and save them in palettes, collections of colors—without wasting any paint.
Sample and Match Colors
You can also sample and match color with any photograph or other image on the screen. Love the colors in that landscape by Vincent van Gogh or that Martha Stewart Living interior? Choose Tools > Color Screen Picker and save the color. You can sample a whole photograph to create a full palette of colors based on a field of wild flowers.
Even more fabulous is the quality of color. On a computer, screen color is instant and luminous. It doesn’t take hours of mixing and 45 coats of thin glazes to get a rich pale blue.
Automatically Generate Palettes
The program will also create analogous splits, angled accents, complements, smooth gradients, shades, soft blends, rectangle shades, semi-circle blends, mono comps, and tetrad blends. I have not a clue what an angled accent or tetrad blend is but my original palette was transformed into 20 or so radiant prisms of perfectly calibrated colors. Fabulous.
Once you have a palette of colors you like, you can name it and save it. As a graphic or website designer this is fabulously helpful because you can save by project. if you are doing website design, you can print out the html # codes for each color. You can also check your color to see how they work for those who are color blind.
Share Color Palettes & Get Ideas
Color Schemer also has a website where people upload their palettes so you can scan through tens of thousands of examples, and even rate them. They are all named: A Rose, A Walk in the Park, Angel in the Moonlight. Even Baby Poop and Windows XP. Wedding names are common and get a lot of stars: Winter Wedding, My Wedding, Silver Wedding, Tiffany’s Berry Wedding, Sunny Wedding Day. You get the idea.remixed colors, you have to mix them every time you want to use them. With Color Schemer, you just enter the color number or drag and drop to your new palette or graphics program. Some artists keep records of 2 drops this and 4 drops that, but many painters and designers are intuitives. Intuitives think differently—we do it the hard way and recreate.
And avoid Taxes
I spend hours there, particularly instead of doing my taxes, like today when I’ve received my last deferral and have four days to finish them. I have a whole folder of palettes, my own and others. Totally useless. Complete waste of time. So I recommend Color Schemer if you care about color, or even if you don’t. You might grow to love it since you don’t even have to mix the paint.
This entry is Part II of a two part post on Color. In case you didn’t take my advice the first time, you may enjoy Part I: Colorist Painting that might contribute to your appreciation of color and thus of this program.