The paint guy at the hardware store in Reno flipped my whole color brain with one sentence
I was standing in the paint aisle at a hardware store in Reno about 8 months ago, trying to match a teal for a client logo, and I was getting nowhere. I had like 6 paint chips fanned out and they all looked wrong under those fluorescent lights. This older guy who worked there walked over and said "stop looking at the chip, look at what's next to it." He grabbed a gray chip and put it next to my teal and the teal instantly looked brighter and cleaner. Then he put a yellow chip next to it and the same teal went muddy and gross. I stood there for probably 10 minutes just moving chips around like a kid. Turns out I had been picking colors in a vacuum for a long time, always judging a swatch on its own. Now I always test a color against the 2 or 3 colors it will sit next to in the actual layout before I commit. Does anyone else do the side by side test or do you just trust the swatch by itself?