Choosing colors

This past two weeks or so, I have been working with my niece, who is also my graphic designer, designing a banner to hang in our booth at quilt shows.  We collaborated to get the finished design to the printer.  My major in college was Fabric Design...before computers, Katherine's major was Graphic Design with courses in Illustrator.  For me to learn Illustrator would be a steep learning curve.  We started out with the purpose of the banner: to explain why our patterns are loved by our customers.  I wrote the benefits and she designed the layout which went through quite a lot of changes.  Without trying to hurt her feelings, I asked her why she chose the background colors she chose.  She replied that choosing colors was not her forte.  I suggested that she look at www.design-seeds.com.  She suggested that I research the colors I wanted.  I came up with this as my first choice:

I loved how the animals looked in silhouette, but Paul, my husband, wanted the detail lines on the animals and we all decided that the white animals with gray lines looked best.  With that color combination and many changes this is what the banner will look like:

I highly recommend using www.design-seeds.com whenever you have to come up with a good looking color combo that suits your project.  In fact, wandering around on that website will train you to be more observant when you look at your world.  It took me a few tries to figure it out.  I copied the address of the combos and the names to put in an enmail to Katherine...but I was forgetting what I was liking.  I then pinned it into a board on my pinterest.com account using the "pin it" button, next to the color combos.  That way I could see all my colors side by side.