Generating color palettes

Colormind is a color palette generator, go to the homepage to try it out.

As a designer one of the first things I do when starting a new project is to get a sense of the color palette. Making color palettes is a difficult process because while most people can tell when a combination of colors is pleasing, it's hard to explain exactly why. It's thus doubly difficult to produce something that's pleasing and fits with certain pre-requisites, like branding guidelines.

In fact this is something I still have trouble with, and more often than not I resort to a "guess and check" approach, sampling colors from online color generators and sometimes photography. This is obviously pretty tedious and I've long thought that there should be a way to automate the process, somehow distilling the required intuition into a machine learning model.

One of my earlier stabs at this involved an LSTM (a neural net that outputs sequences). The results look ok but the LSTM really doesn't like bright colors. Because the model is afraid to be wrong, it likes to choose middling values - dull browns and greys.