Why We Save Color Palettes Before We Know What They’re For

Sometimes the thing you’re looking for isn’t the thing you end up finding.

Today, I opened Coolors while working on one of our newest murder mystery games. I had a general color direction in mind, so I was doing what I often do: generating palettes, clicking through combinations, and waiting for something to feel right.

The very first random palette that appeared wasn’t quite what I wanted for the mystery. But it was surprisingly close to a color scheme I’d already been imagining for a book.

So I saved it.

Not for the project I was working on. For something else entirely.

And that is a pretty good example of how we use color at Skills Murder Mysteries.

Color Is Part of the Creative Process

We use color for just about everything we make.

Obviously, every murder mystery game needs its own visual identity. A glamorous old-Hollywood mystery should not feel the same as a dark academic mystery, a ridiculous holiday disaster, or a sun-soaked tropical crime scene.

But color also finds its way into our logo design, website, social media graphics, marketing materials, book projects, cover ideas, and plenty of things that are still sitting somewhere in the “maybe someday” pile.

Sometimes we open a color-palette tool because we need a very specific answer.

Other times, we open it because we need ideas.

Those are not always the same thing.

Sometimes a Palette Comes Before the Project

There is something useful about seeing colors together before you have decided exactly what you want them to do.

A combination might immediately suggest a setting.

A warm, faded palette might feel like an old photograph, a desert motel, or a paperback mystery from another decade.

Deep jewel tones might start to feel theatrical, luxurious, or slightly sinister.

A strange combination you would never have chosen manually might suddenly make sense for a character, a book cover, a marketing campaign, or an idea that has been sitting in the back of your mind for months.

That is why we save palettes even when we do not have an immediate use for them. They become part reference library, part mood board, part creative prompt.

Sometimes we come back to them weeks or months later and realize we finally found the project they belong to.

The Wrong Palette for the Right Project

That is exactly what happened today.

I opened Coolors looking for inspiration for a new murder mystery game. Instead, I got a possible book-cover colorway.

That might sound like a tiny thing, but those little moments are often where creative projects start to take shape.

The palette did not magically design the cover for me. It did not tell me what the typography should be, what the composition should look like, or whether those exact colors will survive the final design process.

What it did was give me something concrete to react to.

That is often all you need.

A visual starting point can turn “I have a vague idea of what this should feel like” into “Oh. Maybe it looks something like this.”

How We Use Color Across Skills Murder Mysteries

For our murder mystery games, color helps establish mood before a player reads a single character description.

A palette can make a game feel sophisticated, chaotic, eerie, playful, vintage, romantic, campy, ominous, or absurd.

For our website, color helps everything feel like it belongs to the same company even when we are featuring wildly different mysteries.

For social media and marketing, it gives us a way to tie graphics back to a particular game, launch, season, or project without making every piece of content look identical.

For books and other creative projects, color can help us explore tone long before the final artwork exists.

And sometimes we are not designing anything at all.

Sometimes we are simply scrolling through palettes because one unexpected combination can send an idea in a direction we would not have found on our own.

Why We Use Coolors

Coolors has become one of those tools we tend to keep coming back to because it works for both sides of the process.

If we already know what we want, we can build and refine a palette around that idea.

If we have absolutely no idea what we want, we can start generating combinations until something catches our attention.

We also use it to save palettes we may want later, explore different colorways, and test combinations before committing them to a design.

At this point, it has worked its way into far more than just our murder mystery games. We have used it for game design, branding, website decisions, social graphics, marketing ideas, and now, apparently, accidental book-cover inspiration.

Which feels about right.

You Do Not Always Need to Know What You’re Looking For

One of the easiest ways to get stuck creatively is to believe you need to have the entire idea figured out before you start experimenting.

You do not.

Sometimes you start with a plot. Sometimes you start with a title. Sometimes you start with a character. And sometimes you start with five colors that somehow feel like they belong to a world you have not built yet.

That is one of the reasons we like collecting palettes before we know exactly where they will end up.

They give future ideas somewhere to begin.

And every once in a while, you open a tool looking for the colors of a murder mystery and accidentally find the colors of a book instead.

We use Coolors constantly in our creative process. If you want to explore it yourself, you can find it here through our affiliate link. If you decide to purchase through that link, Skills Murder Mysteries may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.