ColorSchemer Blog

Ah, the good old days…filled with recess, eating glue, and scribbling with rainbow-colored crayons like only a 6-year-old could.

And while your drawings might not have been masterpieces, you can capture the fun, creatively-named colors of your childhood (or even your child’s childhood) on the web with this list of Crayola Crayon hex code equivalents:

Download all of these crayon colors to ColorSchemer Studio: crayons.cs

About these colors

All of these colors are rough approximations from Crayola’s current list of 120 Crayon Colors. ColorSchemer is not affiliated in any way with Crayola - we just thought it would be fun to see what “Atomic Tangerine” looked like on the web.

Hot on the heels of the v1.5.4 release, ColorSchemer Studio OSX v1.5.5 (Mac) is now available.

Among the improvements in this new release:

• Export your colors to Apple Color Picker (clr) files, which you can use to load all of your colors into the standard Mac OS X color picker. There have been a number of requests coming in for this recently, so I hope this helps those of you looking for a way to connect with the standard Mac picker.
• More Leopard fixes and improvements…

You can download the latest release here: http://www.colorschemer.com/colorschemerstudio.dmg, or use the “Check for Updates” menu item within the app.

There’s also more in the works as far as import/export formats go, so if there’s any application or palette format you’d like to see included in a future release, please let me know.

Note: The minimum operating system requirement for this release is OS X Tiger (10.4+). If you’re still using 10.3.9, you can download a compatible version of the app here: http://www.colorschemer.com/archive/colorschemerstudio_1.5.3.dmg

If you missed out on the holiday savings last year, here’s an early gift from some of your favorite Mac developers: MacSanta!

MacSanta features software from 5 different Mac developers each day, offered at a 20% discount to you.

And today only, you can receive a 20% discount off the price of ColorSchemer Studio by using the coupon code MACSANTA07 when you purchase through our Online Store. But act fast - this coupon expires today!

And make sure to check back with MacSanta each day to see what new deals he’ll have for you tomorrow!

For all of the Mac users making the move to Leopard, ColorSchemer Studio is compatible with Mac OS X Leopard.

Also, if you use the Dashboard Galleria widget, a new version (v1.1) has been released to fix an issue with its display on the Leopard Dashboard.

While people are gearing up for October with all kinds of breast cancer events and fundraisers, there’s another growing group of people spreading the word across the internet.

Pink for October is a campaign that started last year, in 2006 with a small group of web designers who wanted to design their web sites with a pink theme in order to bring awareness to the cause.

“Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research.”
~ Official Pink for October site

That small group quickly grew into more than 1500 people, including many non-designers. This year they’re hoping to see many more people joining in. If you have a website and you have creative control over it, consider “going pink” and posting a note about the Pink for October campaign.

Aside from just redecorating, participants can also share stories and help raise funds to support breast cancer research.

Some help for non-designers

If you’re not a web designer but would like to “go pink” with the rest of them, don’t worry. There are plenty of web templates out there with pink themes. If you’re a Wordpress user, try the Wordpress Theme Viewer and search for pink.

I’ve also developed a couple for you myself, which you can find on my downloads page. I haven’t been able to find any quality templates outside of Wordpress, but in many cases if you contact the designer of the theme they may give you permission to convert it to another platform if you give them credit for the design. You may also have some luck with the Wikipedia entry. There are some other types of templates listed there.

Pink Inspiration

For those who want to design your own web site, here are a few color schemes for inspiration:

You may also do a search in the Gallery for “pink“, or even “pink for october“, and if you create a theme yourself, why don’t you add the “pink for october” tag so others can find it.

Posted by guest blogger Natalie Jost. Natalie is a web designer and a lover of all things color. You can read her blog at standardsforlife.com.

Buried among the bigger product announcements coming out of today’s much anticipated media event, Apple announced a refresh of their iPod Nano and Shuffle lines.

Besides some new features and a fatter form factor for the Nano, both the Nano and Shuffle are now available in a few fresh new colors:

iPod Nano

iPod Shuffle

Having not seen them in person yet, these muted, Spring-like colors appear to be a drastic change from the sleek, vibrant, “hip” Nano/Mini colors Apple has chosen in the past.

And something tells me those silhouette commercials just wouldn’t have been as cool with a robins-egg blue background from these new iPods…

We’re going to be adding a little something to the ColorSchemer blog every couple of weeks by showing various color schemes based on a single color theme - and you can participate!

Each time we post a color theme, we’ll mention the theme for the next article in the series. You’ll have a week to post your color scheme ideas (with a special tag) to the ColorSchemer Gallery and we’ll feature the best ones in the next color theme post, along with a credit to you as the submitter.

To get things started, the theme this week is all about the color blue.

Vintage Bookmark

The first place I found inspiration this week was a simple vintage looking bookmark from Peridot Press. These are great muted colors that can inspire anything from interior design to web design.

Squidfingers Graphic

Next is a plain blue wallpaper graphic from Squidfingers. Travis Beckham has put together an extensive inventory of wallpaper graphics perfect for website backgrounds and this one perfectly blends two very cool blues which, in the way they’re blended, actually look like more than two shades of blue.

ferm LIVING Wallpaper

This wallpaper pattern from ferm LIVING (physical wallpaper that is) only uses one shade of blue but it’s such a rich blue green I had to share. Mixed with a creamy white, it really makes the feathers pop. It just shows a color scheme doesn’t have to have more than two colors to make a statement. In fact, in many cases, the fewer the colors the better.

Katja Behre Wallpaper

Brown is a common partner for blue. It’s a nice neutral color that enriches whatever shade of blue it partners with, in this case a turquoise shade. This is a beautiful wallpaper from designer Katja Behre.

Laura Ashley Wallpaper

Going with a lighter brown and a lighter blue is this wallpaper design from Laura Ashley.

Multi-colored Rug

This “Pooky Rug” moves us into a brighter, more playful display of blue with a few more colors. It makes for a fun color scheme that’s still on the neutral side.

Wrapping Paper

Finally, proving you don’t have to have a lot of blue to cool down a warm scheme, is this wrapping paper from The Paper Source. They actually have a lot of beautiful papers in this pattern and others like it. It’s worth a look for a lot of inspiration and for lots of neat different kinds of paper.

Next Theme: Red

Next time we’ll look at another primary color: red. So upload your red color schemes to the Gallery, and tag them with the keyword “red“. For each scheme you contribute, it’s helpful if you can:

• briefly explain what inspired the scheme
• share a little info about yourself: a link to your blog or website if you have one, for example.
• link to a photo or URL that inspired the scheme

Or, if you used any special features of ColorSchemer, tell us that too.

Then keep an eye on out for your schemes in a future article!

Posted by guest blogger Natalie Jost. Natalie is a web designer and a lover of all things color. You can read her blog at standardsforlife.com.

Following up on the ingenious color-changing coffee lids, here’s another neat idea to make your coffee-drinking experience even better: color-matching coffee mugs.

From the maker:

“Mugs to help you mix your favourite brew to just-how-you-like-it by matching the colour guide on the inside. Available in Tea or Coffee styles.”

Just add milk/cream/sugar/etc to match your drink with the color of your choice for the perfect cup, then enjoy!

Posted by guest blogger Natalie Jost. Natalie is a web designer and a lover of all things color. You can read her blog at standardsforlife.com.

Now here’s an ingenious product: Sydney-based Smart Lid Systems has developed a coffee lid that uses color to let you know when it’s safe to drink your beverage.

If your drink is too hot, the normally-brown lid will turn bright red to warn you that you’re about to burn your mouth. And if it isn’t sealed properly on the top of cup, the lid shows spots of brown to indicate it’s loose.

McDonalds could have used this product a few years ago when they lost a lawsuit for $2.9 million (later reduced to $640,000) to a woman who burned herself and filed suit because her coffee was too hot. And I could have used this last week when I burned the roof of my mouth and couldn’t taste anything for 2 days.

Over the last few years, all of the major browsers have included support for a special set of 140 colors that are recognized by their color name within HTML or CSS code.

This means that rather than having to remember that the color orange is specified with the hex code “#FFA500″, you can simply type the word “orange” when specifying a color in your code and the browser will automatically translate it to its hex code.

Below is a handy reference list of all 140 browser-supported named colors, which you can quickly sort by color family or name.