Color Creator Templates

A set of Photoshop, Sketch and Affinity Designer documents that use base colors to generate larger palettes. It’s a bit like an advanced color picker, in the form of a document.

When we built Skala Color, the goal was to create a compact colour picker that covered the most common and most useful ways for choosing colours.

But, there are lots of additional features I’d like in Skala Color that we haven’t added yet — more experimental methods, like being able to blend between any two colours, rather than just adjusting brightness and saturation for a specific hue. Or, blending between any two colours, using different blending modes.

We’re all so used to using hue, saturation and brightness sliders, and I think that will remain the dominant method for choosing colours, but there are definitely some interesting alternatives. Alternatives that could give a fresh perspective on picking colours.

The good news is that we don’t need to add those abilities to Skala Color — they can be constructed as a document. So, that’s what I’ve done.

The Color Creator Templates are available for Photoshop, Sketch, and Affinity Designer. They’re free and open source, released under the BSD license.

The Color Creator Templates can be used to explore color variations, and build nice color palettes. It generates lots of variations that can be used to build your color palette. Here’s the Photoshop template in action.

The templates are built differently for each design tool. Due to the nature of what’s being attempted, a variety of tool specific methods were needed — blend if and group clipping in Photoshop, symbols in Sketch, and layer effects in Affinity Designer.

The Photoshop Color Creator Templates also include posterize adjustment layers that control how many steps are used in the gradients. The layers are turned off by default, because they make the document slow to use, and because (maybe?) a smooth transition is nicer. If you’d like to quickly turn them on, or alter the number of steps in the gradients, please search for “#steps”.

Instructions and more info is available for each supported design tool:

Download: Color Creator Templates

I hope you find the templates useful.