Picking Colors for Your Podcast
It is no secret that I am inflicted with colorblindness. Colorblindness affects 1 of 12 men in the world and 1 of 200 women.
While my dreams of being a fighter pilot were dashed at a young age, it hasn't stopped me from doing things like building websites or photography. There are tools out there that make these tasks a little more accessible for people like me.
Adobe created a website called, "Kuler," sometime around 2010. They then rebranded to Adobe Color in 2014. The site allows you to find color combinations that look great. You can explore trending colors. It gives you the ability to upload an image and it will then give you a number of different color sets that would look good with that image. It is a really powerful tool for everyone—colorblind or not.
Adobe Color for Podcasting
How does this affect podcasting? I thought you'd ask. Adobe Color is great for any branding projects. Whether you're creating new podcast graphics, cover art, social graphics, a website, or basically anything for your brand, you can use Adobe Color to find a color palette and then save that palette so they're always handy.
It also imports your palettes - or "libraries" - into Photoshop, Illustrator, or Adobe Express. If you use Canva, you can easily copy and paste the color hex codes into your brand kit so that your color use is consistent there, too.
It's a fun tool that is also productive and FREE. Check it out at color.adobe.com.
Transcript
Fuzz Martin 0:00
Good Morning Podcasters I want to share a tool with you that is great for people like you and colorblind people like me. And I promise you that it ties into podcasting. Stick around and I will connect the dots. Just not the dots where you asked me which number I see.
Fuzz Martin 0:18
Happy Monday. I hope you had a great weekend. This is Good Morning Podcasters and I am Fuzz Martin, a business owner, writer, former broadcaster and strong protan. Strong protan!? What is that? Great question. A strong protan is a type of red green colorblindness that causes the red cones in your eyes to detect too much green lights and skimp on the red light and this throws a whole bunch of things off, not just green and red. I often mix up blues and purples, yellows and greens, orange and greens, reds and browns, browns and greens. Sometimes it depends on the backgrounds and light temperature and all of that. I didn't know the Minnesota Vikings wore purple until I was in college. I once got pulled over for running what I thought was a flashing yellow stoplight and happened to be flashing red. I proudly own a pink water bottle because Nalgene decided to call their colors surfer instead of pink and it looked to me like it was blue on Amazon. But that's okay. I proudly use it. And then I tell people that Nalgene is ableist if anybody asks, Why have a pink water bottle, and back in the third grade, my mom couldn't afford a Crayola crayons. So she bought me Kmart brand, which didn't have the names written on them. I remember getting in trouble by Mrs. Dewey for going too fast and not paying attention. And while those were probably both true, I have a minor disability and she lacked patience. All of this is to say I had to adapt. And thankfully there's a tool out there for me.
Fuzz Martin 2:00
owever, some time back around:Fuzz Martin 2:37
Adobe Color is helpful for people like me, because I can search for something like let's say, dark red. And it will give me a bunch of color combinations that include dark red, and then some colors that look good and go along with it. Then I can simply grab the hex codes, the CMYK, or RGB settings. And then I'm off and running. This site isn't for colorblind people, I think this site is actually for designers who wants to explore trending colors and look at different color combinations not inside their work that they're creating. You can use their Explorer tab to find color combinations that are trending and hot right now. You can upload an image and it will create a color theme or find one for you that's based on that image.
Fuzz Martin 3:27
It has a contrast checker to be sure the colors that you select will be visible to people who are colorblind, and then it makes suggestions on how to improve your color combination. You can import your color libraries super easily like as soon as you save them, they roll over to Photoshop if you have Photoshop and Illustrator, even Adobe Express if you prefer to use that instead of Canva. And if you do use Canva, you can simply copy the hex codes from your Adobe Color libraries and paste them into your brand kit inside Canva.
Fuzz Martin 3:57
have available. And there are:Fuzz Martin 4:47
Oh by the way, it's also free.
Fuzz Martin 4:50
One other colorblind anecdote before I met my wife, I briefly dated a woman who was colorblind and I just thought the genetics of this were interesting if she ever had a boy child nailed, that child would automatically be colorblind because colorblindness travels on the X chromosome. There you go. Dropping a little science for you here on Good Morning. Podcasters so check it out. color.adobe.com Again, it's free. It'll help you get your colors in line and make your podcasts brand better.
Fuzz Martin 5:24
That'll do it for today's episode of Good Morning Podcasters if you ever have any questions for me, or the show, fully accessible, email me Fuzz at Good morning pod.com. That's fuzz@goodmorningpod.com or DM me on Twitter. New episodes come out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with bonus episodes of a show called Podcasting Sucks with Jeff Townsend on Saturday mornings. Podcasting Sucks is available right here in the Good Morning Podcasters feed and all the episodes are available online and good morning. pod.com. There we go. Kept that nice and short down to about seven CTAs for you this morning. Thanks again for listening. We will talk to you Wednesday, right here on Good Morning Podcasters
