How to know which colours you like

Colours are such an important part of design. And if you’ve ever heard that you need to find your own signature style to be successful as a designer it probably occur to you that colours are a huge part of a signature style. So how do you find your style in colours? And where do you even start? Read on for my personal tips and tricks on how to work with colours in pattern design.

Find inspiration

The first step to understand your colour choices and to figure out which colours you like is to find inspiration. Use Pinterest and save a board with colours and colour combinations that you like. You can save images of anything such as artwork, home decor and places - it really doesn’t matter which image it is, as long as you are drawn to it based on the colours.

Analyse

Look at pre made colour palettes that you are drawn to and try to figure out why you like them. One of my favourite sites online for colour palette inspiration is Love Print Studios Colour Crush posts.

Experiment

Try out different tools online to experiment with different colour palettes. Two great tools for this are Coolors and Adobe Color Wheel .

Practice

As with everything that you want to get better at - you need to practice a lot. Create a few different colour palettes and use them to create artwork. You will probably notice after a while that you like certain colour palettes more than others.

Often times when you learn something new it can feel as if you want to skip a few steps and just know it all right away. This is unfortunately not how it works. Everything is a process and you need to keep at it and practice and learn from your mistakes.

Want to learn more?

If you want to learn more about how I work with colours in pattern design you can check out my Skillshare class Mastering Colours in Pattern Design . You will learn the techniques that I use to develop my own color style and how you can use the same techniques to develop yours. I will show you how I work with color palettes and different colorways of patterns and I will even take you through my process of making a second colorway of a whole collection. We will talk about how and where to gather color inspiration and how to work with different color modes, such as CMYK, RGB and PANTONE when designing patterns.

P.S if you want to check out my classes and don’t have a membership on Skillshare yet, you’ll get 1 month of free premium membership via this link.