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Extreme Colors

By Smashing Editorial, October 22nd, 2007 in Inspiration | 25 Comments | Forum

The beginning of the week is always tough. Coffee breaks are tedious. The aftermath of weekend is still evident. And conversations with your colleagues aren’t that enlightening. Yet there is always a number of tasks you need to get done until the end of the day. To spark your imagination and help you to get through monday’s creativity block we are going to provide you every monday with “Monday Inspiration”-posts — brief pointers to appealing design approaches, interesting ideas and unusual solutions.

Today’s monday inspiration is all about some really colorful pages. Be prepared for some extreme colors.

Extreme Colors

Kashiwa Satos Tempest of Colors is actually a design portfolio. The Japanese designer has chosen a quite unusual way to exhibit his skills — instead of boring screenshots Kashiwa Sato presents color palettes used in his projects. In fact, he does it in a quite excessive manner on almost every page.

The color combinations are, however, not just placed before the actual site description. The whole portfolio is built in Flash, and all color palettes are moving with different speed, thus creating a quite unusual visual experience. Caution: the portfolio is indeed quite unusual and strange and as such not recommended for very sensitive (you’ve been warned) or epileptic people.

Well, Klaus Mitteldorf’s Portfolio is really creepy. At least it has a very creepy intro. So better don’t turn up your loudspeakers. The site is not only extremely colorful, it turns out to be really terrible if your cursor touches the links. Flash-based, of course.

Raquel Falkenbach’s art could be considered as ugly. But there are so many colors and it perfectly fits to this post.

Published in Inspiration, October 22nd, 2007
Tags: animations, art, colors, flash, inspiration, palettes

1.

jon (October 22nd, 2007, 6:10 pm)

I love the use of highly contrasting colour so this is right up my street, great article again guys.
2.

Swift (October 22nd, 2007, 6:28 pm)

This adds onto the list of resources for design and color schemes for me! I really loved the adobe one, whereby the colors given really are attractive and good looking.

All the sites given by this article sure are unique and give a different taste towards usage of colors! Nice content once more and thanks!

Swift
3.

nibbler (October 22nd, 2007, 6:30 pm)

The default page of Klaus reminds me of Radiohead’s latest album cover, however Klaus could have used that type of design prior to them. I like his idea, but, like many Flash websites, the navigation is terrible.
4.

Eli (October 22nd, 2007, 7:11 pm)

Love the really bright colors here, really inspiring stuff. The colors just have to be used correctly, to look beautiful rather than hideous :D

A good color inspiration resource is Adobe Kuler: Link [kuler.adobe.com]
5.

Will (October 22nd, 2007, 8:40 pm)

I really don’t like Kashiwa Satos’ site - its really messy, confusing and looks unprofessional with all the moving colours. The rest are okay though…
6.

Will (October 22nd, 2007, 8:44 pm)

In fact no…no no no… Raquel Falkenbach’s page is awful!
7.

Design Creme (October 22nd, 2007, 9:30 pm)

” Raquel Falkenbach’s art could be considered as ugly. ” - I really don’t like that site.. my eyes hurt.
8.

Anthony (October 22nd, 2007, 9:42 pm)

Although this is great for getting over the Monday block.. it is quite harsh to view bright colors on a Monday morning.
9.

loops (October 22nd, 2007, 9:45 pm)

Raquel Falkenbach’s default background reminds me of a record collection (vinyl that is), very colorful, just like your collection of cds/dvds perhaps.
10.

Andy Gongea (October 22nd, 2007, 9:52 pm)

Strange.
11.

Joan M. (October 22nd, 2007, 10:38 pm)

A massive number of different colours is always exciting and inspirational: like opening a big box of colour pencils. You imagine so many possibilities.
12.

G (October 22nd, 2007, 11:06 pm)

AMAZING!! I was just in the process of redesigning my homepage for my site and wanted to find the current trends in web colours. Did a quick search and coincidentally this is the main article you have on the site!

Good to see that I’m not the only one with a passion for extreme colours (and a little reassuring that i’m not loopy too!!)
13.

L (October 22nd, 2007, 11:26 pm)

Wow! it really wakes yoo up from a monday!.. I feel bright colors are very atractive, but not necesarily in a good way.¡ sometimes.
14.

eurojoe (October 23rd, 2007, 1:40 am)

Interesting list. The “kashiwasato.com” is really cool, but gives me a headache because all the movement.
15.

Dawid Michalczyk (October 23rd, 2007, 3:25 am)

It’s fascinating how we all see things differently. There is not a better place to realize that than on the net. Some of the color combinations on certain websites, to me, can be down right unpleasant!
16.

Daniel (October 23rd, 2007, 4:41 am)

Smashingmagazine is one of those sites that I always check for new content and always get really impressed by the quality of your articles.
Even tough most of your content is based on links to other websites I really appreciate the work you put in search and sorting this resources.

Thank you
17.

Stef Nitert (October 23rd, 2007, 5:45 am)

too much movement for me.. I’ll stick with Link [www.colourlovers.com]
18.

Anon (October 23rd, 2007, 7:08 pm)

You missed the originator of contrasting colour block stripes in fashion Sir Paul Smith Link [www.paulsmith.co.uk]
19.

Aken (October 24th, 2007, 1:45 am)

too much contrast for my eyes
20.

Dario (October 25th, 2007, 8:33 am)

ow….
my eyes hurt after the Japanese dude!
21.

Niyaz PK (October 26th, 2007, 1:06 pm)

What Mr.Sato did is a very good idea…
22.

Kostas Mavropalias (October 29th, 2007, 2:33 pm)

Satos’ site definitely made me forget the weekend and start the new week. Now I’ll be blind until next Saturday :P
23.

hi (February 6th, 2008, 3:16 am)

this is useful article, thanks alot
24.

sweds (April 8th, 2008, 1:00 am)

that is probably one of the coolest sites ive seen. kashi see’s things differently, it’s refreshing.