POV: When did colour palettes become content?

Creatives of a multitude of disciplines have always maintained a personal affection for the art of a good colour combination. “I loved the colour palette” is an accolade often relayed in discussions of favourite paintings, films and of course branding projects. It’s a specific attribute, but it’s one that can make an outcome sing.

However over the past year or so, colour palettes have become a content commodity of sorts. On X, designers are curating palettes to signify design prowess. Sometimes, this is connected to a recent project, like a consumer brand, at other times they feature no context at all. These curated shares are also extremely popular, racking up hundreds of saves and likes – at times more so than the actual project itself.

Such attention to design detail is, of course, no bad thing. This openness of behind-the-scenes creative thinking has the ability to spark a project, or aid a designer scouting around the internet for references. But it’s interesting to consider why designers are sharing this content – openly and for free. There are tools for this task, and much scientific thinking, but perhaps the ability of colour combinations to indicate the personal taste of a designer, their own attention to detail, is the latest “business card” to gain a prospective client’s attention. After all, a perfectly considered colour choice holds the capacity to evoke mood or emotion and, in time, build brand recognition. It’s even referenced in popular culture – Miranda Priestly argues its importance in the infamous “cerulean top smackdown” of The Devil Wears Prada.

And while this evident diligence from designers is a shareable aspect of creativity we love, the little context that comes with these shares feels like a missed opportunity. We want to know how the curator found that particular hex code, what sparked the choice of one shade over another. Colour palettes speak to us, clearly, but the first part of the conversation is missing. Potentially, this is another symptom of the creative industry being tempted by purely aesthetics, as opposed to context. Or, it simply speaks to an intrinsic desire to catalogue away references that make us feel something.

A platform that sits between these two reasons is Found Color. An archive exploration of accidental colour schemes, it’s continuously curated by creative developer Gareth Jones, and offers a little more of a backstory in comparison to social-shared contextless hex codes. Founded while Gareth was working at creative agency Eighth Day, the site began as a documentation of colour schemes that formed regularly and fortuitously in his camera reel, and had done “for as long as I can remember,” he tells It’s Nice That. “It wasn’t a big leap from there to wanting to share these colour palettes with others.”

To launch the site, Gareth developed a tool to extract the three most dominant colours in a photo taken and saved – Found Color then shares this original image next to details of the prominent colours featured. While this format isn’t totally different from the curated palettes filling timelines, the platform’s openness about where such palettes are sourced presents a far more inspiring experience for the viewer. It’s also infinitely more gratifying: “There’s something captivating when the seemingly chaotic world assembles a pleasing combination of colours, purely by chance.”

This wider popularity amongst the design community for categorising and sharing colour palettes is a cultural curiosity Gareth has noticed, too. Rather than reflecting a designer’s personal skill or design sensibility, Gareth believes the visual notoriety of colour palettes represents “a broader shift towards valuing curation over generation”. As creatives of all disciplines look a little closer for potentially generated outcomes from their peers in the face of AI – demonstrating taste, even by a colour palette, might allow for a curatorial edge. “It’s as simple as, ‘I like the way this feels, and you might too,’ compared to the overwhelming options effortlessly presented by large language models and other automated resources,” he adds.

Sharing colour palettes on social media is arguably part of a noticeable shift in behind-the-scenes imagery becoming more visible in a project’s final outcome. As tools like Figma have become central to many creatives’ processes, the sharing of initial ideas, or even discarded projects, is becoming more and more common. Perhaps, as Gareth points out, this may be due to a want to prove that the creative is being developed by an actual person. After all, “As the lines between artificial and authentic continue to blur, anything that can be traced back to a genuine human connection will always resonate more deeply with people,” he argues.

Found Color’s origins in the real world naturally speak to this want to seek a project’s origin. Today, the site operates beyond just Gareth’s camera roll, expanded with submissions. In part, this is due to the project’s inception – being a natural collection of palettes the designer had spotted. “I quickly realised how difficult it is to intentionally seek out something that is meant to be discovered by chance,” admits Gareth. “In fact, when you go out with the intention of finding something unplanned, you often end up doing the opposite, forcing the experience rather than letting it happen naturally.”

Gareth’s point around the high value of curation in the creative landscape today makes a strong argument for colour palettes becoming the latest star of design socials. Even though they’re, on the surface, aesthetic, their current resonance amongst the design community speaks to something deeper. In Gareth’s view, the images that connect most are those that are “unintentional contributions of many people to a scene they don’t realise they’re part of, captured by a camera that just happens to be passing by.”

In turn, we’re naturally drawn to platforms like Found Color, where an eye for detail is married with serendipity. Anyone can pick out a colour that speaks to them, but it’s a designer’s eye that can remix them together, spot that universal characteristic and communicate it back. Long may it continue – we only wish individuals would show us their inspirations behind this inspiration to colour code too.