Forum Discussion
A Way to Organize Color Swatches
I'm a big fan of organization and efficiency when it comes to production eLearning development. One of the biggest challenges is keeping track of hexadecimal colors that I use on a daily basis. I used to use Adobe Kuler, which was a fantastic way to explore color combinations and a swatch panel that I used to organize all the colors I used for various projects. Well, they've recently changed to Adobe Color and have basically ruined what wasn't broken and now its requires Adobe Express in order to edit and save color palettes, so I started researching other options. Frustratingly, nearly all the options I found required a subscription.
What I ended up doing is create an html document that I keep on my desktop and it's been absolutely wonderful and I wanted to share with this community as I have received so much help and assistance from this amazing, creative community of professionals.
Open and edit the html document with Text Edit, or Notepad and you'll see the section where you can add your own color swatches, or update what's there. You can name them whatever you want and add in the hexadecimal color code. When you open the document in a web browser, you simply click on the color you want to use and it copies the hexadecimal code to your clipboard. My next push will be to create another one that is all pastel color combinations. This has ended up being one of my favorite new resources and best of all it's free and super easy to customize.
Enjoy and continued success!
Randy, I really like your idea, you're spot on that one-click copy is the bit that actually matters day to day, and I feel your pain on what happened to Kuler. Judy, I've done the screenshots-with-hex-codes trick too; always works, and does what it says on the tin!
I built my own tool some time ago. Same principle, click a swatch and the code's on your clipboard, but you add and organise everything in the browser, palettes per brand or project, hex or RGB copy, bulk-paste a whole list of codes at once, and (in Chrome or Edge) an eyedropper that grabs colours from anywhere on your screen, brand PDFs included. It saves automatically in your browser, with export/import for backups or for sharing a brand palette file with your team.
Free, no sign-up, nothing leaves your browser: Swatch Library
Thanks for keeping inspiring, both.
5 Replies
Sweet!
I've created PPTs with the color codes to match Storyline themes. It's just sceenshots of the theme with the hext codes in text boxes next to the colors. For example:
This requires selecting and copying text to get the hex-code, which is better than retyping it—but not a cool as your one-click-to-copy solution.
Thanks for sharing this. 👍
That's actually a very good idea as well! Love getting a peak behind the curtain of Judy's awesomeness!
Randy, I really like your idea, you're spot on that one-click copy is the bit that actually matters day to day, and I feel your pain on what happened to Kuler. Judy, I've done the screenshots-with-hex-codes trick too; always works, and does what it says on the tin!
I built my own tool some time ago. Same principle, click a swatch and the code's on your clipboard, but you add and organise everything in the browser, palettes per brand or project, hex or RGB copy, bulk-paste a whole list of codes at once, and (in Chrome or Edge) an eyedropper that grabs colours from anywhere on your screen, brand PDFs included. It saves automatically in your browser, with export/import for backups or for sharing a brand palette file with your team.
Free, no sign-up, nothing leaves your browser: Swatch Library
Thanks for keeping inspiring, both.
This! This right here is such an elegant and useful tool! If I had the skills to develop a solution like that, I would have. Brilliant! Having this on the cloud, so to speak, is much more convenient and easier to ensure it's updated. Having the desktop version that I created was a solution where form follows function, but having both in your solution is next level. You guys really are eLearning Heroes!
An elegant solution! Thanks for sharing your expertise, DShaw. 👏
