Inspiration: How to Choose a Party Color Palette

I heard about a new online tool that identifies color palettes and tried it out for you. I thought it might be an easy way to choose a color palette for your next party. I have to say I was pretty excited about the possibilities of Chip It by Sherwin Williams, but a little disappointed by the experience of it. Still, it’s new, so maybe they’ll continue to improve it and it will become a new must-have.

Chip It works kind of like Pinterest. You drag a Chip It icon to your browser bar and when you see a photo online that you want to translate into a color palette, the Chip It tool takes care of it for you. Chip It identifies the colors in your photo as Sherwin Williams paint colors. Here is the palette from my Valentine’s SweetTart party.

Here’s how Chip It Is supposed to work

1. Click the Chip It button in your toolbar to activate the tool.
2. Roll over the image you want to chip, then click the Chip It button when it appears.
3. Save your new ChipCard.

When it works, Chip It is really cool. But sometimes, the Chip It button never appears. And the “main colors” identified aren’t usually the main colors in the photo. I mean, do you see turquoise or copper red in my St. Patrick’s Day party? I see brown, orange and shades of green.

The Sweet (Not Spooky) Halloween party is a little closer. I see violet, mandarin, and green in my photo.

The Letters to Santa Party is a little closer still. I think Chip It handles simpler photo composition better.

The thing I really like about Chip It is that you can use it on web images. (You also can upload photos.) But for our purposes, if you see a party online that you love, but want to identify the color palette, you don’t have to have a photo to upload.

My alien life dessert table palette came out pretty accurate.

Here’s how I’d improve Chip It

1. It would always work. There is no obvious reason why I can’t make a chip from my flower fairy party, but I’ve tried multiple times, and can’t make it work.
2. The palettes would be more accurate. Chip it picks up on background colors and shadows more so than on the primary colors in the photo. If you look at my rainbow backdrop from my Wizard of Oz party, wouldn’t you expect the colors to be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet?
3. You could embed your chips right from the Chip It site instead of having to share them and embed from an outside source, like Pinterest.

My verdict? Almost really cool.