Finding Your Color Palette

A color palette forms the visual foundation of your digital scrapbooking, helps maintain consistency, and makes your layout aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable.

While color palettes date back thousands of years, color palettes are commonly used in digital design, presented as a combination of HEX codes. HEX codes communicate to a computer what color you want to display using hexadecimal values.

To create a color palette that attracts your eye, you'll need an understanding of common color associations.

• Orange is energetic and warm. Some common associations with orange include creativity, enthusiasm, lightheartedness, and affordability.
• Red is the color of blood, so it’s often associated with energy, war, danger, and power but also passion, desire, and love. Some common associations with red include action, adventure, aggression, and excitement.
• Yellow evokes positivity, youth, joy, playfulness, sunshine, and warmth.
• Pink evokes feelings of innocence and delicateness, gratitude, romance, softness, and appreciation.
• Blue is perceived as authoritative, dependable, and trustworthy. Common associations with blue include calmness, serenity, confidence, dignity, and security.
• Green is the color of nature. It symbolizes growth, freshness, serenity, money, health, and healing.
• Black represents power, elegance, and authority. Common associations with black also include class, distinction, formality, mystery, secrecy, and seriousness.

When working with colors, it’s easy to get carried away with aesthetics over practicality. Of course, your digital scrapbooking page should be visually pleasing but it also needs to be enjoyable to view, easy to read, and timeless.

Some things to remember:

• Use a dark color for text to ensure legibility
• Keep light colors for backgrounds
• Use contrasting colors for accents

When it comes down to choosing a color palette, it's easy to feel like you have no idea where to start. Luckily, there are lots of ways to choose a color for your digital scrapbooking layout. Look to existing digital art kits, find color palettes online, look to nature, or even a store display or magazine layout.

If we stop and take a look, color palettes are all around us! What color palettes will you see today?