Saturday, March 5, 2011

Colour: Color Scheme Designer and RAL color chart.

Recently, we have been working on colour in our Design Principals 2 class. Most of you have probably done their research about the chosen colour, but the information below may be useful for the future reference as interior designers we will be working with colour a lot.

Choosing a colour palette for your project can be a challenge task.
Fortunately, there are a TON of colour resources on the web for selecting, testing and even STEALING (ha!) colour combinations.

 

 COLOR SCHEME DESIGNER


Color Scheme Designer

Petr Stanicek's Color Scheme Designer is a web-based color scheme selector that allows you to select a color, generate a palette of color combinations, view the palette as a sample web page, and with color deficit simulators. The color palette you generated can be exported as HTML/CSS or as a Photoshop palette.

Color Scheme Designer contains a vision simulator (maybe not very useful for interior designers, but very interesting feature), which shows an example of what the normal population sees, along with examples of what persons with various forms of colorblindness see, such as protanopy, deuteranopy and others.

That's how the colour palette looks like for a person who is colour blind. 


The site uses a color wheel to allow the user to select the base color to be used for the color scheme. The tool allows the user to select from a number of scheme types, including mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic and accented analogic.

It also has an option to view colours as RAL palette - which is very useful for interior designers. Just find the colour you like, get it's RAL-HEX symbol and you can find exactly the same colourof paint in a DIY store :-)
Of course the result may differ from the colour you picked online, but it all depends on your monitor settings.

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WHAT IS RAL ?

RAL is used for defining standard colors for paint and coatings. RAL is the most popular Central European Color Standard used today The colors are standard used in architecture, construction, industry and road safety.

You can see RAL charts in DIY stores when you are looking for a paint. TONS of colours. No wonder it's difficult to make a decision :-)






On an official RAL website you can find all the colors and you can also match your HEX symbols from Color Scheme Designer with the most commonly used in decorating RAL symbols.



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