This palette is another one I did for the Design Resource Center. It’s a great example of starting a palette with an accent piece and letting it guide the rest of the palette.

I found this abstract pixelated leaf upholstery in the Design Resource Center material library and loved the segmented movement and colors in it. I decided to support those earthy colors with a couple rich natural pieces like the reclaimed wood and leather.

I also love to support movement with movement - either with pieces that have similar movement as my accent piece or contrasting movement. Here, I’m supporting the curving movements of the leaf upholstery with a quartz stone surface’s meandering white veins, and contrasting it with the linear movement of the plexwood.

Textural cues were also important in this one. I took the segmented pixels of the accent upholstery and found pieces that also exhibited a “knitted together” or cell-like composition, like the green upholstery, the leather with its blotted texture, the glazed tile that fractures as a result of the glaze type, and the rough clay tile surface (in yellow). And of course contrasting these textural cues with smooth and linear materials is important too, the light finished wood, and the smooth glazed tile and quartz.