Choosing Color Palettes for your eLearning

Great topic Katie! I'm also a big fan of Adobe Color. I love how you can upload an image/logo and it will general a color palette from it. For example, here is what it generated from the Firefox logo:

Hi Katie - check out: http://designschool.canva.com/ 

Some nice tutorials on design basics.

That's a great resource! Can I ask another question? How would you determine what color goes where? For your master slide background color, fill color, stroke, font color, highlight, etc.?

I love how it breaks it down into backgrounds, images, fonts, etc. This will definitely be helpful! Do you prefer a more flat layout or let the content you're working with determine your look and feel? @Jackie Van Nice gave a good tip that she designs based on what her learner's are used to.

Katie - your topic is great! Defining the right color palette for any course can be overwhelming. I try and keep the palette simple, by using a monotone color scheme paired with white as a "relief" color.

I start with a base color and add a couple of tints to it so it has some contrast. For example, if my base color is at 100%, then I would add a 50% color tint, and a 20% color tint to get a slight variance in my base color. 

The base color would be used as the main color (for example a background) and the two tinted colors could be used to work with the main color to highlight important elements without resorting to the use of a standard highlight color (like bright orange or fire red).

Here's a great article from Designmodo.com that explains how to choose a color palette http://designmodo.com/flat-design-colors/  

The article is about Flat Design and Color Trends, but the information can be applied to your color palette in your course.

I find that I reach for http://paletton.com the most with https://kuler.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/ coming in at a close second. They give you the option to pick either monochrome, complementary, 3 color (adjacent), triad (3 complimentary), tetrad (4 complimentary) and free style pallets. With Paletton you can also see an example of what you choose, color tables or choose from presets.

http://www.pictaculous.com/ and http://design-seeds.com/ are great if you have an image you want to use the color pallets from.  Or you can check out color sets and appropriation on Pinterest and Canva. 

I have http://www.colorhexa.com/ handy when I need to make RGB to Hex or other format changes.

Katie - I'm not a graphic designer, so this is not intuitive to me either, but it's something I could use more insight to as well. The colour tools are great for the mechanics of choosing colour, not so much on the guidance of "what do I do with this palette". At least for me.

It's going to depend if you have brand guidelines or design standards to follow. Usually I look at the client's brand and website first. That often gives a lot of insight. Then it's just a lot of experimenting for me. I'm sure it's not the most efficient method, so did a little searching too.

Links that I found helpful:

• http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/series/design-school-for-developers--webdesign-13793 - this has some good insights on colour theory that can be helpful and has a series of other tutorials that might be useful.
• http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/choose-color-scheme-your-website/ - this has key considerations to take into account when you are choosing colour schemes
• http://blog.crazyegg.com/2011/12/30/pick-website-color-combination/ - this includes some methods that you can use to approach selection
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/08/color-theory-for-designer-part-3-creating-your-own-color-palettes/ -this one has some good examples and is part of a series as well

Thanks for asking the question. It pushed me to do a little digging and reflection around the topic and I've learned some good tips while doing so.

Hope that helps,

Holly

This thread could make a great challenge :)

I'm still a huge fan of Colour Lovers.

Oh, that is awesome! What a truly great palette. Kudos to those who can do this freehand. (Please tell me they can't ;~))

Overwhelmed again! Lots of great links to further confuse the confounded. Thanks ;~))

I am a big fan of Colour Lovers as well. My big downfall is on the graphic design side of things, which I believe is often the challenge for a lot of instructional designers. Luckily there are tools like Colour Lovers like out there that make "borrowing" from others easy enough.

I'm a big fan of design-seeds.com! 

Hey folks,

Just wanted to let you all know your contributions and tips were super helpful in this discussion and I wrote a recap article for it: 5 Ways to Choose Color Palettes for E-Learning. 

You rock! Thanks for all your awesome tricks.

Thanks for writing such a wonderful article! 

I've never heard of that website; I'll have to check it out!

Love this thread, and definitely am familiar with a lot of what's been said, but thank you for the others!

I did want to mention though, what I've found recently is that making it look good is one thing (and the tools/resources help), but making it readable is another.  Lately, after my color palette is chosen, I've been using http://www.dasplankton.de/ContrastA/ to figure out what combinations are the best to present text (font and background color).

Good stuff!

I don't know if you all are still following this, but I still feel so beginner at this. I've got two distinct, but related colors in my company's brand: 004b85 and 4d90cd. How do I choose which colors to use as the palette? And how do I know which ones to use as "accent colors" when I'm creating the color theme on PPT (or is that really necessary)? Thanks for keeping this alive!

I attended a webinar about how Disney works with training (Training Magazine Network: "Mousify your training") and someone added a great link to the chat. It is about using color based on Disney's characters. It may seem a bit far off from what you are looking for, but I found it very informative and learnt a lot from it. https://venngage.com/blog/disney-villains/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=disneyvillains&utm_term=disneyinfographic&utm_content=ctatext