Chad showed this one to me, but since it came up in a conversation with some other colleagues yesterday I thought I’d share it on his behalf.
It’s often the case that when designing a solution, you and the client agree on a color palette as part of the overall look and feel of the product. However, when several developers are working on the same project, one needs a way to share those colors across the team.
On the Mac, one way to do this is by defining a new Color Palette, and share the Color Palette file with the other team members. Since this trick uses the OS Color Palette tool, it’s Mac only.
1. In Layout Mode, access the Colors dialog from anywhere it’s available – line color, text color etc.
2. Select the Color Palettes tab (the middle one). The default Palettes are Web Safe, Apple etc. We want to create a new one. Use the dropdown on the right of the Palette drop down and select New. Then select Rename to name it however you wish. We typically name it after the project it’s for.
3. Add in the Custom colors as needed, and rename them, e.g.
Header Background
Body Background
Tab 1
Tab 2
Button 1
Button 2
Drop Shadow
Text on Dark Background
Text on Light Background
Click OK when you’re done.
4. In the OS, navigate to ~/Library/Colors, where ~ is your account directory – colinkeefe/Library/Colors, in my case.
5. Copy the new Palette you created and share with the other team members. They should drop it into their own ~/Library/Colors directories.
There’s probably a cooler way to share these, or possibly automate synchronizing them across a team, but I haven’t given that any thought really.
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