A Question of Colour

The Grade 5 team was lucky enough to have Noah Katz (Digital Literacy Coach at Dover) speak to them about Visual Literacy last week. He spoke about the elements of Graphic Design, referring to the acronym:

CRAB
Contrast
Repetition
Alignment
Balance

Before

Students had the opportunity to design a poster, then give it a makeover. We saw some really interesting before and after shots, let me tell you!

One thing that it seems many of our students struggle with, is an awareness of appropriate colour schemes, or which colours work well together. This is evidenced by the garish rainbow-coloured gradient fill text boxes we see so frequently when students present work digitally.

There are some great websites out there that help even the most chromatically-challenged of us select colours which work well together.

The first I'd like to highlight is Color Scheme Designer.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer provides a broad range of colour schemes to choose from, from monochromatic to accented analogic, and everything in between. It creates a nice palette, which you can see with hex codes as well as just the regular view. This is very helpful when choosing colour schemes for a website.

It also provides a preview of what a website might look like using that colour scheme, providing both light page and dark page examples.

I have had success using these colour schemes to create a custom palettes in Pages when creating a poster. I'm sure there's probably a quicker work-around, but I take a screenshot of the palette, bring it into pages, use the colour picker tool to select the right colours, then drag them into the frequently used colours at the bottom of the colour tool inspector.

Colour Lovers

Colour Lovers provides both colour schemes and palettes with hex codes, together with patterns, which can be customised to a certain colour palette. All very engaging and fun!

Sharing sites like these with our students will hopefully help them gain an understanding of aesthetically pleasing colours, patterns and designs, that will assist them in getting their message across to an audience when they are making posters, designing websites or any visual graphic.

In Grade 5, I hope to help them learn to customize their blog to a colour scheme of their choice using these two sites as a reference.

What other sites do you use for colour schemes? What else can I share with my students?