LiveSchemes are like a color scheme-creating machine. You give them a starting color, and they go to work – giving you countless ideas for color palettes based around your starting color. You can even create and save your own LiveSchemes.

To see LiveSchemes in action, check out the quick demo video below, or download ColorSchemer Studio 2 to give it a spin yourself!

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.

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.

So if you’re using Firefox, head over to http://library.uncc.edu/programs/firefox/colorschemer.html to install the Color Schemer Gallery search plugin with a single click. The full source code is available, too.

Now finding the right color scheme is as easy as searching Google. Great work Brad!

Tentatively called Color Schemer Galleria, a beta version should be available shortly for you to play with.

She gives a great behind-the-schemes look at how she created two of my favorite color schemes from the Gallery:

• Ghirardelli [Behind the Scheme]
  Created from a picture of a puzzle of Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, this scheme captures the bold colors Ghirardelli uses for their chocolate wrappers.
• Spring Girl [Behind the Scheme]
  Natalie created this vibrant, spring color scheme from a picture of a girl lying in the grass. This is an excellent example of how to capture the feel of a photograph – all hundreds of thousands of pixels – using only 6 colors. Great work Natalie.

I’d love to see more behind-the-schemes work like this (especially if you’ve shared any of your schemes with the Gallery). So tell me, how do you create your color schemes?

• Christmas color schemes
• Cool color schemes (to give your site a winter chill)
• SnowBall Classic – A beautiful wintery color scheme.
• Paisley
• Lifeworks – Contains a vibrant set of reds and greens.

I hope these schemes will help you to outfit your site with a color scheme to go with the changing colors of the leaves.

Here are a few of my favorite Fall color schemes:

• Autumn
• Country Harvest
• Golden Sunset
• Under the Lights
• agroove4
• CountryDoodleDoo

And here are some relevant tags from the Gallery:

• Autumn
• Brown
• Earthy
• Fall
• Nature

If you use any of these schemes (or any schemes in the Gallery) on one of your sites, drop a note in the comments – I’d love to check it out!

(Also, be sure to check back around the middle of December for more holiday-flavored color schemes.)