vintage colors

I'm having to take it slow today because my 2-year-old son is home sick, so I'm taking this opportunity to indulge in one of my favorite time-spenders: building up my collection of design goodies. You know what I'm referring to: Photoshop brushes and patterns, vector illustration elements, fonts, etc. – and there are mountains of freebies out there in the virtual world. It's just a matter of sorting through the masses to find the real, high-quality ones (which is why I can't justify the time normally).

One of the areas of design I've always found difficulty with is that of color. There are loads of resources that offer view on color theory, samples of two- and three-color combinations and so on, but when it comes down to it, choosing a color palette at the beginning of each project takes time and effort. And the importance of color is not to be underestimated.

So as I sat here this morning with my son on my lap watching a Christmas show on the second monitor, I've been leisurely browsing away, building up my happy collection one piece at a time. Which brings me to the point of this post: today I came across a page of vintage advertisements (which is always fun), and I realized that many of these samples have such great colors. And frankly I would have never thought of these color combinations myself.

After all, that's what inspiration is: looking at something and realizing you never would have come up with that on your own. And it's such a beautiful thing.