So, we all know of Ben’s profound love of all things design-y, and all things colourful, and occasionally of his love of random bullshit he’s coded too. Recently this lead to the expulsion of a program written in PHP which would take a given colour, and process the page in that colour. That’s nothing special, I admit - but this one does it slightly differently. In the first version (I’m amongst coding version 2 with a bunch of new/interesting/useful features) it generates random colour strings and applies them to the page on each refresh, and spits out a bunch of data relating to said colour. Here, give it a go yourself. Remember your colour, because it’s going to serve as useful further down the track. And yes, it should be fairly unique - the way I’ve coded it allows for 13,481,034 possible colours (for ease’s sake of not needing to accommodate for random hex values with only a single figure and thus killing the output) every possible colour in the 24-bit RGB gamut is accounted for - all 16,777,216 of them. I changed the way the output code works so now every possible colour is taken care of, not just those with values above 17 on each of the channels).

After hitting refresh a few hundred times and seeing so many wonderful colours, I got to some thinking. What we don’t see a lot of is design with rich palettes and wildly striking colours out of the ordinary, instead, we see the same tired tones over and over. It’s basically almost as if the design handbook for the modern designer stipulates no creativity or creative license in terms of colour. And frankly… it’s depressing. Then it occurred to me: throw it out there, a challenge for the keen designer, to sharpen their teeth and test their metal against a formidable foe - completely random colours. Relying on the random output from this program is perhaps not entirely practical in terms of outputting harmonies (that’s in the works), however, it does force you to think outside the box. And thinking outside of the box in this world is something that has become entirely necessary.

So, here’s the low-down.

• THE IDEA: Design something using this body copy stolen from our good friends at Wikipedia OR COPY OF YOUR CHOICE related to the topics of either colour or design, be it for print or web (if for print, strip out the latent HTML in the provided copy), with the primary colour selection being left down to computational fate.
• THE HOW: Go to the random colour picker 3 times, recording each colour it chooses for you. These colours will serve as the basis for your design, and will serve as prominent figures in terms of your colour selection. Periodically, polls will be ran to let the people decide who has achieved the best results in this exercise, which will see their work featured here, but also on the forthcoming Show Your Colours website.
• THE RULES:
  1. Basis colours for your design must be picked using the random colour picker’s output. Variations (lighter/darker versions of the same colour) of these colours are encouraged, as is the use of black (#000000) and white (#FFFFFF) to assist in harmonising the selections.
  2. Colours outside of your selections are allowed, however the three primaries must be exactly that - your primary colours. Any deviation from this is not allowed, and quite simply, undermines the entire point of this exercise.
  3. The body copy is encouraged to be used as the primary copy for your design. If you wish you may omit as much of this copy as needed, however, it needs to be included in some form or other. Also, changing the order of the copy is permitted so long as it conforms to the rest of the stipulations in this rule. Failing this, including your own copy - so long as it is relevant to the task - is acceptable. Please ensure it includes textual hierarchy if possible.
  4. If you choose to do web design, table-less layouts utilising valid CSS and XHTML are highly encouraged. This helps in keeping things standardised, as well as really just makes the web a better place to be. That, and you’ll know in your heart that you’re one of the good guys helping to forge towards a more standard web environment.
  5. You may use a maximum of 3 typefaces. I cannot stress this point enough. The overuse of different typefaces is an absolutely horrible habit and anybody caught in the midst of it should head back to Design 101.
  6. You may base your layout as heavily on images as required, as long as they conform to the colour standards pointed out in rules #1 and #2.
  7. You may include your own images, so long as they serve some practical or beneficial purpose to the theme of this - colour. If they don’t, don’t include them.
  8. You may submit as many different designs as you wish based on as many different colour trios as you wish, in fact, this practice is highly encouraged.
  9. For each design you produce, post a comment here stating the three colours you got, as well as a link to your design.
  10. Following the rules of design you learned in school is vital. It kind of defeats the purpose of the entire thing if we can’t follow at least some of the things our teachers tried to hammer into our heads.
  11. Non-designers are encouraged to participate. If you fall into this category, add “I am a non-designer” into your submission. At the end of it all I’m going to tabulate all the data for designers-vs.-non-designers and present it in a unique way. Watch for it.

And that’s about the long and short of it. Get cracking guys, I’m eager to see what you can produce!