All the Pretty Colors

October 30, 2014 10:17 AM

Generate Color Palletes on the fly. Here's a Halloween theme with MeFi colors to get you started.
posted by Anonymous (16 comments total)

12 moves to victory. Neat game, but I don't fully understand the rules.
posted by boo_radley at 10:22 AM on October 30, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is so great. I often have a difficult time coming up with good color schemes.
posted by slogger at 10:41 AM on October 30, 2014

Similarly: type something, generate a background pattern.
posted by oulipian at 10:43 AM on October 30, 2014 [8 favorites]

Even if you will never design anything with it, this is ridiculously fun.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:50 AM on October 30, 2014 [3 favorites]

Does the background pattern generator have an easy way to grab the generated patterns for use elsewhere?
posted by jjwiseman at 11:07 AM on October 30, 2014

I don't think so. They're generated using CSS data URIs. You can look at the page source if you want the CSS. If you want an image file, you could take a screenshot but you'd have to carefully crop it to get a repeating pattern.
posted by oulipian at 11:37 AM on October 30, 2014

What's the relationship between what you type and the background generated?
posted by Sangermaine at 11:38 AM on October 30, 2014

GeoPattern can be grabbed from the git page and used for a site. Doesn't look like it's meant for the purpose of generating images to grab and use.
posted by evilangela at 11:40 AM on October 30, 2014

Neat.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:44 AM on October 30, 2014

This is great. The frivolous reason I need colour palattes is for the different activities in my training log graphs. Most palettes only have five colours but with this you can lock a few of them and regenerate to get more colours that often work with the first five.
posted by carolr at 11:47 AM on October 30, 2014

I don't think so. They're generated using CSS data URIs.

It's actually just setting the background attribute - background: rgb(151, 8, 14); and the like. Data URIs are use to store image data, so it'd be kind of silly for solid colors like this.

You can also grab this from line 29 in the source code:
var colors_url = ['#006699','#cccc00','#050002','#f5b409','#f55c09'];
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 11:48 AM on October 30, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's actually just setting the background attribute

Oh, we were talking about the background pattern generator (GeoPattern). Sorry, I didn't mean to distract from the original link.
posted by oulipian at 12:14 PM on October 30, 2014

really could use a color wheel / palette picker, and the ability to adjust +/- R or G or B individually
posted by gkr at 2:31 PM on October 30, 2014

Oh, we were talking about the background pattern generator (GeoPattern)

That'll teach me to follow conversation.


To redeem myself, here's a link to Adobe Color (nee Kuler), which is a color palette generator that runs off of various color theory concepts.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 4:09 PM on October 30, 2014

ColorBrewer2 is a similar tool for picking map color schemes. It has the added bonus of allowing you to set limits like photocopy or colorblind safe for sequential, diverging or qualitative data. Tools like this are the only reason everything I make isn't either black and white or look like someone puked up a bunch for fruit loops.
posted by ChrisHartley at 5:45 PM on October 30, 2014

It's "palettes" not "palletes"

And not "palates" or "pallets", either.

Spelling in English is impossible, with all these vowels that kind of mush together.
posted by etherist at 6:38 PM on October 30, 2014