Ok, I have got to share this with you guys because this is just such an awesome tip. I just got out of a creative workshop with Joshua Davis, and the man is just full of Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash hacks and tippies…

Use this to create some pretty awesome complimentary color palettes.

Here’s the core concept: Steal color from photographs.

Step 1.
Open up Photoshop, or your most favorite image editor. Find a simple photo with some nice colors, and open er’ up. I chose this one, because it’s awesome:



Step 2
Go Save for Web.. and select gif from the sub-menu, strip down it’s colors to 32 no dither-ish.

Step 3
 Now ignore how Netscape 2 your image looks and check out the swatches on the right. What do we have? Beautiful complimentary colors. And here’s the quick dirty theory: When you average out a million color Image, colors will compliment each other. This generally works best when you use 32 or less colors. [ A magical number ]

Now at this point you could pack it up, and call it a day. But this tip goes farther, if you want. Save your file in its current state as a .gif, now open up Flash. Open up the Swatches window (try not to vomit at the sight of the web-safe color palette), hit the Swatches sub-menu and select Add Colors…

So here’s the part that made me go “ooooh Shabang.” Logically you’d think you can only import other color palettes in some random .fkeiald format. But no, check it out! You can import a .gif file.

Sweet! So select your gif you just made, hit open, and check out the results:

You’ve now brought that beautiful complimentary color palette into Flash. It’s an awesome tip, that’s why I had to share it.

Enjoy. No more excuses for ugly web pages.