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It's A Colorful Life
Featured Author:
Mike Lenhart
After spending almost 15 years in the corporate, sales and marketing area of the hospitality industry, Mike Lenhart decided to pursue his passion for visual creativity and make a jump to graphic design and visual communications. Founder and Principal of ML Designs, a freelance-based and outsourced graphic design company and also Founder and Director of Creative Core, a graphic design collaborative, Mike can now use his business and marketing acumen in solving design problems for his clients. He also likes to write about the interesting, unusual, and sometimes irritating happenings in the graphic design world. Creative Core Design
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Mike Lenhart
June 19, 2008
Chronicle Books sent me the second in the series of Designer Toolkits called 1000 Colors – Thousands of Color Combinations – and let me tell you, it rocks! The handy CD that accompanies this book is as good as the one that came with the first one by Graham Davis. Color is beautiful and my rods and cones thank you!
Davis’ book is laid-out in a similar way as the Grids and Style Sheets publication. You really need to read the Introduction: How to Use This Book, in order to make good use of it. After that, you’ll be able to look through the multitudes of color combinations, complete in CMYK, RGB, and Hexadecimal versions, to give your designs the extra punch that they need.
On the CD, you get even more. You can load a color palette directly into an Adobe Creative Suite application and even Quark. There are also TIFF and PNG file types on the CD that can be used in Mac and Windows environments.
The sections of the book range in titles from Emotion and Attitude to Art and Inspiration with subsections with names like Funky Critters, Toxic Blend, and Scary Woodland. There’s even more! At the back of the book is a section on color relationships which offers a “refresher” course on complimentary, analogous, and triad palettes. How cool!
colors_1.jpg The Designer’s Toolkit 1000 Colors is a must-have for anyone who really wants to do the best they can when designing with color. Remember, monitor calibration may come up when working with color, as it often does, but it’s worth it to really get the actual color on screen which Davis intends. I hate monitor calibration myself, but, Go Color! just the same.
