Bought a $200 designer color palette book and it's basically useless

I got this big fancy book about color theory for designers last month from a specialty store in Portland. Paid $200 for it thinking it would have all these unique palettes I could use in my web work. Turns out it's mostly just the same basic color wheel stuff you can find for free online. The sample palettes are all for print media too, not digital. I glanced through it once and now it's just sitting on my shelf collecting dust. Has anyone else wasted money on something like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

river_wright2d ago

Traded mine in at a used bookstore for store credit and got a couple of practical CSS reference guides instead. The color book was just too broad for what I needed. What actually helped me was making my own palette swatches from screenshots of websites I liked. Free and way more useful. I also found a few online tools that let me pull colors from photos which gave me way better combos than that book ever did. Sometimes the expensive stuff just looks pretty on the shelf.

river1832d ago

You ever buy a book that looked great but ended up being useless? A buddy of mine did the same thing with a UX design book. Paid full price, read the first chapter, and it was all fluff. He ended up donating it to a library. Meanwhile, @river_wright is spot on about pulling colors from real sites. My friend spent weeks trying to match a palette from a book he saw online, but when he finally just grabbed a screenshot from a portfolio he admired, it clicked. Those little real-world tricks beat any glossy textbook. Sometimes you gotta learn the hard way that expensive stuff is just decoration.