eLearning: Use Pictaculous to Save Design Time, Pull Colors From a Photo

by AJ Walther  

I like design. Mulling over colors, shapes, and composition is a real joy for me. But when someone else is paying me for a design, I need my process to be three things: fast, inexpensive (or free?), and easy. That's where Pictaculous comes in.

Let's say someone gives me a photo and wants me to design around that. I could take the time to eyeball coordinating or matching colors. Or I could use an eyedropper tool to hone in on a few colors to use. But wouldn't it be cool if a site could just do that part for me, instantly? It would, and that's what Pictaculous does. Use the site to browse for the image on your desktop, click the Get My Palette button, and a series of colors will automatically be generated based on the image.

To illustrate this, I used the Los Angeles Community Museum of Art's Collections website to find an image free of copyright restrictions. I found the following Edgar Degas pastel drawing:

Uploading the image to the Pictaculous site gave me the following color palette:

I used a free Hex to RGB site to translate the hex code colors to RGB in PowerPoint. Because I was building this presentation around an art piece, I decided to do a gallery theme. I used simple shapes to design this layout based on the color palette above:

In keeping with the gallery theme, I thought it would be nice to show the Degas drawing in a frame. I could have created a frame in PowerPoint myself, but to save time I did a Google Image search for one instead. I didn't want to worry about copyright restrictions, so I used the advice in this article on Finding Google Images You Can Actually Use to search for an image of a gold frame with no restrictions. This frame was at the top of the results page:

From there I added in the Degas piece, some informative text, and a few drop shadows. In less than 10 minutes I was done… with minimal effort (and no expense) on my part.

The best part? Those colors look pretty smart together. I could easily take that same color palette and use it for another project. Do you have any time-saving design tips or online tools you'd like to share? Lemme at 'em!