Last week, I went to a cabin in Whistler BC this last week to work and play! One of my amazing design students, Cindy, let me stay in her cabin! (Ahem, Brag Alert: it was more like a: A 3 story mansion with hot tub!!!) to write and work on updating the Launch Your Brand Program (to be released this week) Keep your eyes peeled for tons of fun goodies coming your way this week!
Can I get a high five!? Nothing like getting biz done, in style!
I seriously have the best relationships with my students... we really do become branding besties! Thank you again, Cindy!!!!
How to Find Color Inspiration to Use in Your Brand
I found an issue of Cosmo UK Edition and fell in love with the color scheme. So I bought the magazine to see what I could grab from it, decided to throw together a quick tutorial for you!
I thought it would be a PERFECT opportunity to show you how to get inspired by colors (and headlines for blog entries or lead magnets) you see in the world and then use them for your business!
First I take you through the steps of finding inspiration, then you photograph the inspiration with your phone, or with a scanner and you pull this into Adobe Color to pull a color scheme. It's quite awesome to start to find color schemes in the world and be able to use them.
Now, you want to be careful here not to create brand confusion, I am definitely not recommending stealing the brand colors of a competitor, creating a brand or website that looks like theirs and confusing the crap out of everyone. That would be wrong.
But you can find the color scheme of a beautiful photograph you find, a magazine cover, a photo you take, stock images or illustrations you find, etc. Just make sure they aren't brand color combinations. This cover of Cosmo did not use their brand colors.
Remember color + fonts + image style do make up the feel of a brand, so it also is related to a combination of those things for it to really create confusion. If you don't use the exact combination and make things VERY contrasted (very different), then you'll be fine!
In the book, "Stealing like an artist" By Austin Kleon (which is a really great book by the way) mentions in the book about "remixing" and the idea here is to take an idea already out in the world and make it better.
You want your own unique perspective, and you want to mix 2 + things to make something new, instead of stealing ALL of the things from one source.
Stealing from one source is plagiarism, stealing from multiple is research! - Wilson Mizner
Take Action!
Create a unique color scheme from something you find on Pinterest, or out in the world, and use Adobe Color to create a color scheme following the video tutorial from above. Then post a screen shot of this color scheme and explain what you'd be using it for in the Free Facebook Community!
Did you love this lesson?
