There’s no way Josef Albers could’ve known, way back in 1963, how easy it eventually would become to make a color palette. The revered Bauhaus teacher, whose book The Interaction of Color taught a generation of artists and designers the intricacies of color relationships, likely would be stunned to learn that you can create a perfectly good palette with a tap of your keyboard’s space bar.
No, really. It’s that simple. “The process of creating a color scheme should be easy,” says Fabrizio Bianchi. “It should be like brainstorming.”
Bianchi created Coolors, a web and iOS app that lets you generate an infinite number of color palettes by tapping your keyboard like a button on a slot machine. With each tap, a new palette appears on your screen, split into five hue-filled windows. Not crazy about the scheme over all but see an individual color you like? Click it and Coolors will isolate that color; every subsequent tap of the space bar generates a new palette in accordance to your choice color(s).
Bianchi began working on Coolors out of a personal frustration. Palette generators tend toward extremes: too complex or too simple. Some generators provide so many customization options it’s hard to know where to start. Others are like flipping through paint swatches. Bianchi wanted Coolors to land somewhere in the middle, serving up pre-determined palettes that were still highly customizable. Every color has a slider that lets you adjust the HSB, RGB and CMYK values. You can save and export them in various file formats.
Design tools like Adobe Kuler’s color wheel, while simple in appearance, leave nearly every aesthetic choice up to the user. Success depends upon knowing how to work the tool and what kind of color scheme you're looking for. Coolors, by contrast, draws on a database of thousands of human-created palettes. From that database, the algorithm computationally compares values like RGB to generate totally new color palettes. Bianchi says this makes the resulting color combos much more akin to what a human might choose without a computer's help. “It’s almost like emulating the manual process,” Bianchi explains.
Coolors isn’t earth-shattering. You can do a quick Google search and find a handful of color generators that provide the same results. The difference is in the details. With a simple interface and an addicting interaction, using Coolors feels less like design work and more like playing a game. “A lot of users tweeted they spent several hours just pressing the spacebar,” reports Bianchi. “It’s quite crazy.”
