Most brides (couples) prefer to have a set color scheme for their entire wedding, with everything from napkins to bridesmaids' dresses color coordinated. And the invitations are no exception. But how do you decide on a specific color, and which combinations work best? Below are a few ideas to get you started.
1. One way to find inspiration is to look at what's shown on the fashion runways. Since they show at least one season in advance, you should get a good idea of what's going to be hot by the time your wedding comes around. At Cosmoworlds, you can search for Fashion weeks by year or country, and at CIFF (Copenhagen International Fashion Fair) you can download pdfs of fashion and color forecasts for the next season.
2. Look at interior decorating trends, always a good indicator of which colors are in vogue. HGTV is an obvious choice of course, but also check out companies like Pottery Barn, or Sherwin-Williams, who post color forecasts on their website.
3. Color forecasters such as Clariant and Pantone put out yearly guides. Clariant's, which incorporates trends from all over the world, is called ColorForward and is downloadable as a pdf. At Pantone's website, you want to look for their fashion color reports (otherwise you'll end up on pages with printed, and pricey, reports). Lenzing Fibers, a manufacturer of cellulose fibers (used for clothing) also have color trend guides on their website, forecasting a couple of years into the future.
4. Who says you have to stick to two colors? As long as they work well together, feel free to put together as many as you want. For inspiration, check out Adobe's Kuler, where members (it's free to join) upload their color combos, and you can create (and save) your own themes with the help of a color wheel or even a photo that you upload yourself.
5. Colourlovers is a fabulous online community for people who love color (as the name would imply...). They monitor trends (you can see a quick analysis of the color combos used on many popular magazine covers for example) and post interviews with creative professionals as well as color news from around the world. It's free to register, and you can download other member's color schemes, turn them into patterns, and even search for colors. If you for example type in wedding in the search from, you'll get a long list of results, and each color combo is broken down by color, showing both the HEX# and RGB for each. And it's really easy to create your own palettes as well. If you liked Kuler, you'll adore Colourlovers.
6. At Color hunter, you can get a color scheme by typing in a word, hex code or image URL (or upload an image), click search, and voila! Page after page of palettes appear based on your word. "Wedding" resulted in 241 pages, and the hex code #D9ABAB (a dusty pink) in 32,824.
Leigh Hunt said that " Colours are the smiles of nature", and I have to agree. I hope you enjoy playing with colors on the sites above as much as I do, and have fun finding the perfect palette for your event!
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