Foundry's new color palettes will keep you color coordinated

When working with Foundry it has always been extremely easy to create beautiful, custom color palettes in the Control Center and then access them in many of the other Foundry tools. This has made customizing your site easy and consistent across many of the Foundry tools.

This hasn't changed in Foundry 3. In fact I've expanded this concept even further, adding much more functionality than ever before!

"Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other; I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff. But I’ve never seen anything to make me believe that there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything."

In rebuilding Foundry from the ground up I was able to better integrate the Control Center's color palettes into all of Foundry's tools. You'll find the Foundry color presets throughout.

I've also increased the number of presets available to you, both to customize in the Control Center as well as select within the various Foundry tools. You still have the standard 6 color presets of previous versions of Foundry to customize and choose from, but I've also added in an Extended Color Palette with 10 additional color options.

This extended palette consists of preset chosen colors to which you're able to adjust the hue. You can choose from 9 different shades for each of the 10 individual colors. Then access these from within each tool just as you would the Standard Color Palette colors.

Additionally I've also included 9 shades of gray to choose from, as well as white, light and dark in the tools where you'd normally select a preset. This helps in keeping your design consistent as well as speeds up your workflow.

This doesn't mean that one-off color pickers have been eliminated though. On the contrary — Foundry's tools still feature color pickers for adjusting color settings on a per-case basis, offering you even more versatility.

"In a dark place we find ourselves and a little more knowledge lights our way."

I didn't stop there though. I know how hard it can be to settle on a color palette for a site. I've often struggled with this myself. So I created a standalone website for generating color palettes for Foundry called the Palette Laboratory. The color palette for the new Foundry site even found its initial concept in the Palette Laboratory.

The Palette Laboratory site generates random color palettes, as well as allows you to lock in colors that inspire you. Copy one color's HEX code if you like, but better still you can drag-and-drop a color palette directly from the Palette Laboratory site right into the Foundry Control Center within Edit Mode. You can see it at work here in the Palette Laboratory tutorial video:

The standalone palette generator site also offers up a library of hand-picked palettes to choose from. Drag-and-drop one right into the Control Center and you're off and running.

These palettes aren't final though. Once they've been placed in your Foundry Control Center you can still go in and manually adjust and fine tune them to your liking!

"Your eyes can deceive you; don’t trust them."

Since we as designers make use of the Foundry preset colors so often throughout our design process I've also included the ability to dock the Standard Color palette to the bottom of the Edit Mode view using the Standard Color Palette's Sticky Style Guide mode.

This optional Sticky Style Guide feature keeps our color choices at the forefront of our thoughts and keeps the HEX values available to quick reference, too.

"Try not. Do or do not. There is no try."

These new color palette options greatly expand the flexibility and versatility of Foundry 3. Their greater integration throughout all of the tools also helps to add a feeling of continuity to site designs. We think these new color palette options, along with the Palette Laboratory, will really ease the design process.