September Palette

Each morning, after my kids are in school, I set off on my daily multipurpose walk. For an hour, I take a circuitous route toward my favorite coffee shop (JP's Java), listen to my tunes, plan my day, and snap photos with my iPhone (a well-loved, cracked 3GS). I also take photos throughout the day, but my morning photo traipse usually yields my favorite snaps. By the end of each day, I choose my favorite image and upload it to my flickr page. I've been keeping this visual diary since January 1, and as the year progresses, the project is becoming more and more useful to me as a designer. Today, with color on my mind, I've been playing around with various combos to create a palette for a project:

Color on my mind

The Anticipate Chair, named for my favorite new Mod Green Pod custom pattern, is currently gracing my living room so I can photograph it for various purposes and, well, just stare at it. Earlier today, It dawned on me that I was probably spending a little TOO much time absorbing its lovely chair-ness because the new palette I was working on was THE SAME: charcoal, white and gold. It's a fantastic, versatile combo, but I couldn't seem to break away from it.

So, as I have been doing more and more, I turned to my daily iPhone photos. On January 1st of this year, I began uploading my favorite photo from each day, sort of as a visual diary. I am a bit of an obsessive iPhone photographer and snap, on average, about 20 photos a day. Sometimes it's hard to pick just one favorite, but I force myself to stick to just one that best symbolizes an important moment in each day. Today marks the halfway point of the year so I took a little break during my long design day to review the previous six months and the 182 photos I've uploaded to honor and represent each of my days. I spent a little time rearranging the color grid I've created on flickr and miraculously, I broke free of my color rut, even if I just added some blues to the same grey, white, gold combo: