Color schemes I can feel
design-seeds.com
design-seeds.com
The real problem is people don't spend enough time crafting their color scheme and that is where the really issue is.
I completely disagree. I've never left a website because of its color scheme. There's no issue. This blogger is using a gimmick to please casual passer-bys to her blog: taking pretty photographs and pairing a few well-chosen samples from them with a nice name.
These kinds of blogs have bothered me for a while now because I've come to the conclusion that they serve to inspire bored designers by exciting them with this pleasant gimmickry, but never really help past a momentary aesthetic stimulus. I see no actual discussion of substance; process or strategy or how to be this "great designer" you reference. It's a shallow offering. The +50 contrast in her About Me photo speaks for her mission. It's a pretty website, nothing more. Hardly worth praise if you ask me (and I consider myself a designer).
Furthermore, it was me that introduced Design Seeds to the HN community yesterday as a great resource in my article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3467855, before aymeric posted a direct link. Jessica is an artist that loves color and is simply giving you a "DESIGN SEED" from which to build not just your website but your life spaces from home interiors, events, weddings and all types of space. It was me that brought her here and she doesn't deserve your comments. You want to criticize, come after me.
Additionally she has more than 152,330 followers on Pinterest http://pinterest.com/designseeds. She is incredibly popular and at last word her site has crashed 5 times since this post. She is not trying to make money from this.
And if you were truly a designer you would actually understand.
enough said dude.
As you say on your own web site, sometimes you just get it, sometimes you just don't.
Colours do provoke emotional responses, whether or not the viewer realises it, and people do measurably change their behaviour as a result. Legal pads are yellow because it increases concentration. Performers wait in green rooms because it calms nerves. People who wear dark blue suits to interviews are more likely to get hired.
> I've come to the conclusion that [these kinds of blogs] serve to inspire bored designers by exciting them with this pleasant gimmickry, but never really help past a momentary aesthetic stimulus.
Sometimes, a momentary source of inspiration is all you need.
Sometimes, you encounter that inspiration a long time before you find the right time to act on it.
Inspiration that sticks with you for later is observed naturally in a real-life context that makes you remember it, not by demand in the midst of a hoard of formulaic pinterest posts.
Group the pixels into 5 buckets, take the average of the pixels in each bucket and then sort the colors based on the number of pixels in each bucket. Not sure what machine learning algorithm would be appropriate for classification but I don't think it would be that difficult. I'm pretty sure k-nearest neighbor would produce a decent classification if you think of pixels as being in a three dimensional space.
Then assign the color values into your CSS template, voila you should have a design that matches the color palette of each image.
edit: I've been playing with this process and just scaling the image to 16x16 seems to work fairly well for building a palette.
http://design-seeds.com/ is failing for me now.
Someone who knows more about this should jump in and elaborate.
So those three are a go ;)
That said, I'm wondering what a /proper/ license for a colour scheme should be. If it's a css file (or even an emacs theme), that doesn't seem to be so hard to imagine.
also, color palette extraction tool http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/