It’s been a while since we’ve done a web tools run down, so over the next few weeks, we will look at a few items that have popped up since the last go around. This week, let’s look at two new color tools.
First off is Kuler from Adobe. Supposedly pronounced “color,” Kuler is a Flash-based interface for choosing color schemes and palettes, as well as an excellent teaching tool for lessons on color theory. Kuler enables you to choose a starting hue and a set of color relationships, and then automatically generate a color scheme of harmonious shades. It also features a community site and easy functionality for saving your creations (once you have registered for an account), but my favorite tool is the “Create from Image” tool. It allows you to select an image from Flickr or upload one of your own and use it to generate a wide variety of color palettes related to the image’s composition.
The second tool is the Multicolr Search Lab from Idée Inc, which is a tool set for searching Flickr’s enormous image library by color. Given a palette to choose from, Multicolr allows you to add 10 colors to a search list. It then mines Flickr for images with those same colors. This tool is ideal for inspirational research in situations where you have a palette dictated by other elements of the production. Idée Labs also seems to be working on two other search tools that use image recognition in combination with color information and image tags to return better image results than ever before, but they don’t seem to be working yet.
Can’t wait to see them when they are finished.