Adobe Kuler

kuler.adobe.com

Intended audience: People who work with color and design, including web designers, interior decorators, artists, designers in a corporate setting, event planners, and more.

Usefulness of content: I think the Kuler website would be a very useful and enjoyable tool for all of the above groups, but it is of particular helpfulness to artistically-challenged people like myself. When designing a website’s color scheme, the sixteen million colors available can be a little overwhelming. But thanks to this site, you can view user-generated five-color palettes that are named, ranked, commented, adjustable and downloadable. And the best part is that they are tagged with words describing their visual qualities, be it seasons, emotions, locations, themes, or just names of the colors themselves. This makes the entire database of color palettes searchable by a multitude of terms, a huge advantage to those of us more comfortable with words than RGB and CMYK values. However, these are certainly available on the Create page, as well as a very interesting color-wheel tool that implements color-rule algorithms.

Consistency of design: The site uses a black background that makes the color palettes stand out beautifully. The colors are laid out in a horizontal row of squares that fills the screen when clicked on. Most text is in white, and the kuler logo at the top of the page is understated.

Ease of navigation: The site layout is very simple, consisting of a searchable and ranked color palette database, a palette creation page with a color wheel tool, a community forum page, and a list of links. It is fairly easy to navigate around the site using the left-hand navigation bar. Within the Create page, however, use of the browser’s Back button takes you entirely out of the site and back to the page from which you entered. Also, the location of RGB values corresponding to palettes is not immediately obvious. You have to go into the “Make changes to this theme” page to find them. This avoids cluttered design on the color palette display, but the location should be more clearly indicated.