As some of you know, I’ve already got two color-idea books out there: Color Index and Color Index 2. These are very popular and globally available books that offer hundreds of ready-to-use color ideas for designers, artists, illustrators, and anyone else who uses color for professional and personal projects.

Well, the big news here is that I’ve recently finished putting together an all new, bigger, better, and faster addition to the series, and it’s called Color Index XL. The “XL” in the title stands for this new book’s greatly enlarged format, but that’s not all that’s new here. Color Index XL features a super-useful new layout where each page displays a five-color palette in four different versions: bright, dark, light, and muted. I’ve found this to be a highly practical setup since it allows users to freely borrow colors from any or all of a page’s palette-versions when working on layouts, illustrations, or works of art. Another new feature of this book is that each of its 5-color palettes extend all the way to the edges of their page—which makes it easy to hold a specific palette up against other illustrations, photos, or layouts for quick comparison. And, as with the earlier Color Index books, every color in the new Color Index XL is presented with its unique CMYK and RGB formula for easy entry into the computer.

And did I mention that Color Index XL has over 1,100 color schemes along with an enlightening intro chapter on color theory?

You can check out the book on Amazon, and here’s the first video in a series of quick (and free) vids that demonstrate the features and functionality of Color Index XL.