Your Personal Color Scheme Gallery

If you are making good use of your Swatch Book, you may have been collecting colors and palettes that you see on your screen and saving them on cards in your Swatch Book. Browsing through your library of color scheme resources is then as easy as leafing through the cards in your book.

The problem comes when you have created many Swatch Books. If your like me, you probably can’t remember what kinds of colors are contained in each file without opening each file in SwatchBook and having a look through them.

One of the more useful improvements in Windows is the ability to view graphics files as thumbnails in our file system. We can see at a glance what our graphics files contain without having to open file after file looking for a particular graphic.

While it’s not possible to preview SwatchBook files in the same way, the latest version of SwatchBook introduces the next best thing. Your own personal online gallery.

Clicking ‘Preview Files’ on SwatchBook’s menu takes you to the gallery login page.

From here you can create an account or login to access your own personal gallery of SwatchBook files.

Each file uploaded to your gallery is listed in the left hand pane of your gallery page. Clicking on a file in the list will display all of the colors in that file in the right hand pane. You can then see at a glance which file you wish to open in SwatchBook for use in you design project.

The gallery also provides a good way of sorting the colors in your files. With all colors visible at once, you can easily use your SwatchBook Screen Picker to choose the best colors or palettes from each file and arrange them in a new file. You can easily delete files from your gallery as well as adding new ones.

Remember that you can showcase your design skills publicly, by publishing your color schemes in the PagePainter Color Scheme Gallery. Your own personal gallery provides a good way of previewing and editing your colors before publication.

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Grouping Color Schemes in SwatchBook

From time to time I am asked why SwatchBook only allows three colors in a color scheme. I then, of course, explain that this is not the case. Color schemes which extend over more than one swatch card can be grouped together as a scheme by having the same title on each card.

However, it seems to be such a common misconception among new users, that I thought I would demonstrate how this grouping is done. You can, of course, follow these steps with your SwatchBook as you read.

Suppose you have the five colors below, which you wish to save to your Swatch Book as a palette or scheme.

Using the Screen Picker to pick the first three colors and add them to the swatch card is, hopefully, straightforward. Once we have filled the Swatch Card, we add the card to the book.

The next thing to do is to give the card, that is now in the book, a title. Simply click on the ‘Untitled’ card title, type in a name and press the enter key to set the new title.

We are now going to add the next two colors to the Swatch Card.

When new colors are added to the Swatch Card, they replace any colors that are already there. But since we are going to add only two colors, to a card containing three colors, this will still leave us with three colors, one of which we don’t want.

So the first thing to do, before adding the remaining two colors to the Swatch Card, is to clear the card by clicking the dustbin icon on the left of the Swatch Card.

We can now pick the next two colors in our scheme and add them to the Swatch Card.

With this done, we add the second card to the book. Once again, we add a title to the new card in the book. Since the colors on the second card are part of the same palette as those on the first card, we give the second card the same title as the first.

If we apply this method to all color schemes that we add to the Swatch Book, then, as we move through the cards in the book, we can see from the titles, when we are looking at the same scheme, and when we have moved to a new scheme.

If you add some of the colors schemes with more than three colors from the color scheme gallery to your download file and then download and open the file in SwatchBook, you can see how this looks as you move through the cards in the book.

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The Birth of SwatchBook

I developed SwatchBook almost as a diversion from the challenges of maintaining the PagePainter application.

PagePainter has always been an enormous amount of work. The simple idea of making web pages respond to point and click color changes, turns out to be far more complicated than it sounds. I can’t begin to tell you the number of banana skins thrown in front of PagePainter by the seemingly infinite variations in the way that web pages are marked up.

Of course there has always been more to PagePainter than the PagePainter Browser. In addition to the functionality of the Browser, are a range of color tools including a Color palette, Screen Picker, Image Blender and of course the Swatch Card and Swatch Book.

With none of the complexity of the Browsers parsing challenges, all of these color tools worked perfectly well in their own right, although they did leave a lot of clutter on top of the web page.

During one of my periods of exasperation at trying to accomodate the endless list of scenarios that PagePainter’s parser has to deal with, I found myself looking enviously at the easy life enjoyed by some of the simpler color tools found on the internet.

I began to think about utilizing PagePainter’s color tools to develop a smaller application which, once produced, would not require constant rewriting and testing against an ever changing web design environment as PagePainter did.

Immediately, the interface presented itself in my mind. The program would consist of the Swatch Book, Swatch Card and Screen Picker. The Screen Picker and Swatch Card would pop out from the Swatch Book.

The functionality would be simple. Pick a color from the screen - the Screen Picker pops out. Pick the color from the Screen Picker - the Swatch Card pops out. Add colors on the Swatch Card to the Swatch Book and save them as Swatch Book files as in PagePainter. The whole thing would minimize to the system tray when not needed.

That was it. I began working on it straight away.

The first version was released in May 2006. Once produced, it became clear that this was the way to go with the PagePainter interface too. PagePainter’s tool cards were then redesigned to pop out from the Swatch Book in the same way, together with the Image Blender and Color Palette, which also popped out from the Swatch Book.

The Color Palette was added to the SwatchBook application in April 2007 and, at the time of writing, is the final version shown below.

I now hope to use this blog to post news about SwatchBook development, sources of colors for your SwatchBook and general talk about SwatchBook use.

I would certainly welcome any suggestions or comments you might have about the SwatchBook application.

I hope you find it useful.

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