Kuler: Adobe’s Killer Color Application

Color choice is a crit­i­cal part of design, espe­cially on the web. The right color scheme can go a long way in mak­ing a site appeal­ing and ulti­mately draw­ing new and repeat vis­i­tors. For those, like me, who can be color chal­lenged check out kuler. This site from Adobe makes pick­ing a color scheme easy. On the web you can choose your base color, the type of color scheme you are look­ing for such as mono­chro­matic, triad, anal­o­gous, com­pli­men­tary, shades, or cus­tom, and kuler cre­ates a color scheme for you on the spot. From there you can tweak and play around to your heart’s con­tent. Kuler then pro­vides you with all the spe­cific color infor­ma­tion you need to put your color scheme to work — HSV, RGB, CMYK, LAB, and HEX set­tings that rep­re­sent your color choices. It is an amaz­ingly easy and extremely pow­er­ful design tool that has already been added to my list of favorite sites. Another favorite is Seth Godin’s blog, where I learned about kuler. Thanks Seth. You still have the best site on the web.

So why would you care about kuler? I was think­ing about how I might use it. The first thing that came to mind was to dec­o­rate my home. My wife and I are look­ing to repaint a large part of the inte­rior of our home. We also have a num­ber of rooms that just are not “there” yet. Kuler is the per­fect tool for help­ing us get it right. Sure, we will prob­a­bly resort to the good old fash­ioned paint swatch for the paint color we put on the wall, but then what. For us, the hard part is not the color of the wall, but rather the accent col­ors to go along with it. By enter­ing the room color in as a base in kuler, I can then begin to put together numer­ous color schemes to fit the feel of each room until I get some­thing I like– with­out hav­ing to piece together swatches or blindly guess as to “will this look good with that?”

Pro­fes­sion­ally, I can think of end­less uses for this tool. Every brochure, pre­sen­ta­tion, web site, mailer, and mar­ket­ing piece I design can ben­e­fit from using kuler. Again I can start with a base color, like the green we use at LUCRUM, and then quickly mock up mul­ti­ple color schemes to cre­ate dif­fer­ent feel­ings for pieces. This takes much of the guess­work out of the equa­tion, and really stream­lines the cre­ative process.

I am inter­ested to hear your thoughts on kuler (or color as a design ele­ment). Will you use this tool? How?

kuler