Colour Palette Generation

Process

Creating a personal colour palette can be done quickly. The tricky part is iterating and improving upon it until you're satisfied with the aesthetic. After repeating the below process a few times, the hope is that I would be able to create a few colour palettes, such that I'm able to quickly identify which colours I want to use for each purpose. This should ideally save me a large amount of ime while designing decks, documents or anything else that has an aesthetic element and carries my personal brand.

1. Identify the purpose of the colour palette

In my case the primary purpose of this colour palette is usage within the documents that I plan on making through these templates. The type of document which is most sensitive to the colour palette chosen is a PPT. As such, the key purpose of the colour palette being designed here is for ppts which will be submitted as assignments as a part of my MBA, and perhaps any other ppts I will make over the next few years.

2. Identify primary colour(s)

Within any colour palette there should be 1 or 2 primary colours around which the rest of the palette is built. The key colour can be selected as a function of personal taste or as a function of utility. In my case, I believe that a blue based palette is more aesthetically pleasing than most other primary colours. I however, do not have a strong aesthetic sense, and will therefore have to routinely get feedback and work towards improving my colour palette over time.
Primary colours for a PPT template should be dark colours, close to black. The reason is that primary colours will be used for text and also as a background for call-out objects. A second primary colour can also be selected, but I will avoid doing that, and would rather build around a single primary colour, to keep my options open.
More specifically the primary colour I chose is Indigo dye #10405A. I selected this colour by going through various shades of blue on google, and fixing on one that I liked.

3. Use online palette generator

There are a wide range of colour palette generators available online, and a simple google search should help find popular, free ones. I have used coolors.co a few times, and have got used to their interface.

palette generator

  1. Click on "Start the generator".
  2. The genrator starts with 5 colours by default. Additional colours can be added by clicking on the '+' icon, by hovering over the edge between colours. However, I chose to stick to a 5 colour palette.
  3. Click on the hex colour code for the second colour and type in the chosen primary colour (#10405A in my case). Then click on the lock icon for the colour (toggle lock).
  4. Hit the spacebar button repeatedly to generate colour palettes (remaining 4 colours) which match well with the locked colours.
  5. I chose to also lock the 5th colour as white (#FFFFFF), since it is an important, frequently used colour, and the other colours must match with white as well as indigo dye.
  6. The first colour wasn't set as the primary colour because it is useful to have a grey shade in the mix. With white and indigo dye fixed in place, the colours between them (3 & 4) will also lighter blue/green shades. Therefore, a colour must be remaining on the left or right of this range for greys to come up on toglling.
After toggling and fixing on shades (locking) one by one, the colour palette I arrived at was:

More generically a larger set of colour palettes that I have used over time can be found in this google drive folder: colour palettes
Once the colour palette has been generated, it needs to be used as a part of the themes in the various templates being created.