Introduction
Hello readers! For this week's blog post, we were assigned to explore the color matching area of Adobe InDesign, by creating a color scheme using swatches made from our inspiration photo! In this post, I will show you both my inspiration photo and my swatches, while also demonstrating some of the steps I took to create the swatches, and show you both the color swatch panel and the name-tags that can be made with these colors. I hope my learning experience can be useful to any of my fellow Photoshop learners!
Inspiration Photo
Over the past weekend, I took a trip to a place I have frequented often my whole life and a place I consider my second home: New Bern, North Carolina. New Bern is a very quaint small town, rich in both history and art. The small shops located in town carry some of the finest clothing, jewelry, and art created by local designers/artists. New Bern also has what is called the historical "New Bern bears," in which are bears of different shapes and sizes located all around town for those to find, and each is hand painted by a different local artist in town. There are Farmers Market bears, fisherman bears, bears in suits, even a bear with a powdered wig outside city hall, and many more. The bear I chose to use for this project was one of the most vibrant bears in town, made in remembrance of the hurricane that almost washed the town into the Neuse River a couple years back. I not only loved the design, but I thought these contrasting colors would be perfect for finding and creating a color scheme to make my swatches.
Swatches
When creating the swatches, I chose the three colors that stood out to me the most. I really wanted to make the colors stand out from one another, while still making them look organized in the way they were all faded into three different shades. To make the swatches, I had to use the swatches window. From there, I had to click on the "hamburger button" and click "new color swatch," then creating a color that matches a part of my reference image. (McCue, 2018) I repeated this three times for the orange, teal, and purple. To make the tints, instead of selecting "new color swatch," I selected "new tint swatch." (McCue, 2018) This way I could make as many tints as I wanted with one color, just changing the opacity of the original selected color swatches. Additionally, to make this process a little more fun, I decided to give these swatches fun names. Given the fact that I was listening to music while working, I decided to name the swatches after some of the songs/musicians I was listening to. For example, the orange shade is called "Bowie Orange" after David Bowie, the teal is named after Wheezer's "Teal Album," and the purple is named after Prince's "Purple Rain."
Name Tags
After creating my swatches, I then had to create color corresponding sample name tags. This was by far the most tedious and least fun part, as I soon realized some of these colors contrast with each other well, but don't really look good in my eyes. If I had to choose, my favorite one would have to be the Bowie Orange name tag, with the purple name and the teal details. I feel like the darkness of the words with the light stroke colors both easily blends the words to the background but also provides a great enough contrast to where it is easily readable.
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