My first Kuler colour palette - Dettah iceroad. Made from a photo on Flickr.
Harmonious colour schemes can make or sink a project, so it’s best not to just wing it.
I have seen websites transformed from blah to beautiful with a simply tweak of css colours.
So when I spotted kuler, Adobe’s web-hosted application for generating color themes, I figured it might be worth checking out. It was.
Its Air app, kuler desktop, is great for instant colour browsing – you can search by key words and it will find thousands of suitable swatches for whatever mood you want (how many swatches it finds depends on how many users have tagged using that word). You can also flip through highest rated, newest, most popular and random.
Grabbing colours is a cinch, through copying html colour code or downloading an Adobe Exchange file.
Check out this Layers Magazine tutorial on how to integrate files into Creative Suite.
But if you have time, have some fun with the colour create and your own palettes. To do this, you’ll have to go to the kuler site.
Click on ‘create’ and choose from one of the six rules for colour harmony and begin to play with the sliders on the colour wheel.
The most fun feature for me was ability to upload or use Flickr photos to create palettes – my first palette is in screenshot above, it’s the colours extracted from a Dettah iceroad photo on Flickr. The warm and cool colours work well together, should I use this scheme on my new website …
