I\’m not sure what it is, but choosing complimentary colors has always been an issue for me. I have the “eye” to see what looks good on HGTV, but when it comes to actually picking the colors out, I’m a bit clueless. One tool that has helped is Colors by Number, a digital color wheel of sorts for the iPad.
Colors by Number, at first sight, is a bit overwhelming. Well, for me it was because I’m not familiar with this sort of tool. However, I did find it to be quite easy to use after playing around with it for a bit. And with billions of combinations of four colors, that bit became awhile. The app is quite fascinating.
Beyond my amusement, there actually is an audience for this sort of app. Think of all the design professionals, visual artists and the students trying to break into those professions that covet properly placed colors and have words in their vocabulary such as blush, cast, chroma, chromaticity, chromatism, chromism, etc. Those professionals and amateurs are able to cycle through those billion color combinations within their choice of seven different geometric configurations. This, I’m sure, is very useful as colors need to touch to interact and show their true saturation, temperature, contrast, etc.
Even though I’m not a visual artist, I tried looking at this app’s usefulness from the perspective of someone who works with graphic designers. I’ve hired many visual artists to convey client’s wants and needs in a visually pleasing manner. And most have come back to me with work that just made sense and got the go ahead, but a few needed some help. Had I been using Colors by Number, I probably could have been more useful to the designer than saying “it just needs more pop.” I’m sure visual artists cringe at the sound of that phrase.
As for functionality, I believe visual artists looking for a Colors by Number iPad app will find this one to be extremely robust as the amount you can do to tweak the color combinations is quite impressive. The app features the ability to use RGB or HSB color models including a transparency function as well as sliders within each color option that enables the user to change the color by a little or a lot. It also has an eyedropper for sampling and capturing additional colors.
If you are looking for a highly functional and useful tool for your visual arts, then I recommend checking out Colors by Number for iPad on the App Store.
