There’s no substitute for the human eye and brain when it comes to choosing colors and color combinations to please … the human eye and brain. We pick up and integrate, often effortlessly and unconsciously, countless cues about material, texture, hue, lighting, style, fashion, and cultural context. Still, there’s no shortage of mathematical rules – and no shortage of software to implement these rules. Common formulas include triads (sets of three colors similar in saturation and value with hues equally spaced around the color wheel), tetrads (like triads but with four colors instead of three), analogous colors (sets of colors fairly close in hue and more or less identical in saturation and value), etc. Check out Color Scheme Designer for a sophisticated example of an online color-scheme generator based on such formulas.

above: machine-generated color combination of Etsy fabrics using a “split complement” formula

above: compact representation of this color combination

Anyway, I’d been getting impatient with my own piecemeal efforts to put together color combinations of fabrics at morecloth. It seemed to take hours just to arrive at twenty or so semi-attractive combinations. And then it occurred to me that I was, in effect, using whole pages of fabrics at morecloth in much the same way that color-scheme software uses the single colors in a palette. So a wrote a little color-scheme generator to work with morecloth’s pages of color-sorted fabrics.

I asked it to auto-generate some color combinations, and, in a matter of seconds, it came up with fifty-eight of them – most of which looked better to me than the ones I’d chosen by hand! (Is this progress or a reflection on my color-picking abilities? It’s sort of embarrassing to be beaten by a machine, even if you’re the one who programmed the machine.) You can see the fifty-eight combinations here (or just click on the “color combos” link at the top of most morecloth pages). I’m working on additional color-combining rules and plan to have more and more varied combinations in the next site update.