I’ve been telling my students about this wonderful site by Adobe for quite a while and I thought I’d post it on my site as well. Adobe Kuler (http://kuler.adobe.com/) is a fantastic color schemer site. This site is excellent for web and print designers or any kind of designer for that mater.
The site allows you to search though hundreds of color harmonies that registered users have created, or you can use the kuler tools to create your own color harmonies. If your having difficulty choosing colors that work well together, ( a huge design block), this site also allows you to choose a base color and then select from basic color harmonies, which kuler choses the correct colors for the scheme based on the harmonies your selected. For example say you start off with a red for your base color, then choose a complementary color scheme, kuler will automatically pick the correct shade of green that works with the red base color you have.
The other nice feature is that registered members can save their color schemes to go back to later, publish them for public use or download them as an ase file type that can be opened in a variety of adobe software. Best of all registration is free.
Don’t have continuous access to the web, Adobe Labs has a desktop version of the site that runs through the adobe application Air. You can download the desktop version of kuler from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/kuler/
Before installing kuler you must first install the beta of Adobe Air. Air is another fascinating tool that allows programmers to create desktop applications with the use of web program languages such as HTML, JavaScript and Ajax.
For those of you who have been reading and am not familiar with color terminology I’ve listed a couple of terms below.
- Color harmonies serve to describe the relationships certain colors have to one another, and how they can be combined to create a palette of color.
- Primary Colors: (artists) red, yellow, blue (printing inks) magenta, cyan, yellow.
- Secondary Colors: orange, green and purple, made from mixing the primaries: red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green, and red and blue make purple.
- Tertiary Colors: in contemporary usage, the intermediate colors are considered Tertiaries: yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green, and yellow-green.
- Complementary Colors: colors directly opposite each other on the color wheel such as blue & orange, red & green, yellow& purple.