For folks who are stumped about what colors to use for . . . well, whatever . . . there are a few tools out in the cloud that could come in handy. Here is my favorite:
Kuler Interface for Manually Creating a Scheme
This is Adobe’s color scheming offering to the cloud. It’s a nice little Web 2.0 color schemer. Users can create their own colors schemes as well as rate, comment on and download (as an Adobe swatch file) other user’s color schemes. Adobe products, namely Illustrator and Photoshop, now have a Kuler interface built into them where you can directly access or contribute to color schemes from the cloud. This functionality allows users to recolor whatever they want based on whatever colors are popular or highly rated (or not). In this example, I’ve recolored one of the most popular images on Digg from the past couple of days. It’s a “mysterious supernova“. The first image in the sequence is simplified to 5 colors with a live trace in Illustrator. The others are recolored using some of the most highly rated color schemes as evaluated by the Kuler community.
Kulerized Supernova
Kuler isn’t alone, however. There are many other handy color scheming tools out there. Here are a few:
1. 12-Step Color Blender (good for finding the colors right in between two colors you are working with – yellow and blue makes . . . what again?)
2. COLOURlovers (go nuts with colors (or, colours), palettes and paterns)
3. Beta Daily Color Scheme (a somewhat daily color scheme recommendation)
4. Color Palette Generator (upload an image and see what you get)
5. Color Scheme Designer (here’s a nice one that will simulate what your scheme will look like to people with various types of color blindness)
6. Type Tester (this is a bit tangential, but I like it – it will show you color scheme and type combos)
7. Tartan Maker (er, for the heck of it – make a tartan. go on . . . make one . . . )
