When creating a webpage, brochure, or almost any publicity materials for your organization, you are likely to include at least one photo per page. Photos are a great way to communicate information and emotions to your audience quickly, and studies have shown that people remember images much longer than text.
That said, it can be difficult to incorporate an image into a design without making the final product feel cluttered. An easy way to avoid this problem is to use colors in your design that complement your image. One of the easiest ways I find colors that complement my photo is by usingPictaculous.
Pictaculous is a free online color palette generator. Simply upload your photograph or image and Pictaculous will give you a palette of colors that look good with that image. It also gives you the top palettes suggestions from two other sites, Kuler andColourLovers. Unlike Pictaculous, which bases the number of colors in the palette it generates on the visual complexity of the image, these other sites always produce palettes of five colors.
If you are using Adobe Design software you can then download the palette directly as an Adobe Swatch file. Otherwise Pictaculous will give you the color hex code for each color that can be used in other programs.
The site is free, easy to use and very useful. All in all, it’s a great tool to have in your design arsenal. Happy designing!
— Alice Cohen, former intern
