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Adobe Kuler 2.0 is live!

March 18th, 2008 Posted in Flash Player, Rich Internet Applications, kuler, web 2.0, web integration

kuler_logo.png Adobe Kuler is a Flash based web application (and now with an available AIR version) that helps designers and developers with color themes.  Designers can design their own color theme using the Kuler create tools, submit their theme to community for review or look at other designers themes.  The new release has added an amazing feature called color extraction.

Color extraction allows you to upload an image and which is processed to create a color theme.  You can then change how the image is processed by selecting different moods, such as Bright or Muted.  Not only can the system pick the color but the UI then allows you to manually select the locations of the color samples used to create the theme.  Once you create your theme you can then save it in your themes and make it public for others to use and rate.

Other new features include the ability to store an unlimited amount of favorites.  As you go through all the themes you can pick out your favorites and store them to your account.  You do need to log in with you Adobe ID to access this feature.  There has been multiple UI tweaks and also a new drop down for random themes, highest rated, newest and most popular (based on the downloads of the ASE version).  When you download a theme it comes in the ASE format (Adobe Swatch Exchange) that can then be imported into Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash and Dreamweaver.

Kudos to the Kuler team and their newest launch!!

Viewing 4 Comments

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    I've seen a variety of designer tools that help with color palette and I have to say, I've never really understood them. I don't know if this is one area that I've been blessed as an artist or what, but choosing pleasing appropriate color schemes has rarely been a such a challenge for me that I thought to myself, "gee, I need a tool to do that".

    And the other thing that always weirds me out about these kind of tools, is how useless any particular color scheme is without context. There's no color visible to the human eye that doesn't have the right setting. Saying these 3, 5, or 15 colors "look great" together, doesn't really mean anything.

    I guess that's part of what bothers me about these things: they reduce the *apparent* need for a solid grasp of color theory. But they don't *remove* the need.

    However, taking off the artist cap and putting on the web-developer cap: the app is rad. I bet it was a lot of fun to develop and is a truly inspired shot in the dark at social networking. "Let's make color palettes a social thing" Fucking brilliant.
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    For people like you, Kuler is a place to help share your talent with people like me. I have a decent eye for color and I can pick things that work but often there is a wall of the 3rd or 4th color that you need and it is hard to break through it to find a color that really works.

    What kuler does is enables the less design-y people to look at color pre-designed themes and potentially apply them in the website, application and or other aspects of design they are currently facing. I feel kuler also helps in the inspiration aspect by providing tools to help designers quickly create the theme they want and then save it as an ASE file (Adobe Swatch Exchange) which they can then saved for future use; both on and offline.
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    Those are fair enough points, and I do agree that the more tools we have that handle "basic" knowledge issues can raise the general appreciation level for quality.

    I still get weirded out by seeing people say, "those colors (5 or so) look AWESOME!"... when used correctly, I think you can put any 5 colors together and make something pleasing. And whether or not those colors are appropriate to the setting have a lot to do with context. Context isn't something that can be programmed into a tool like this, though the image feature *does* help with that a lot.
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    yeah this is an excellent new feature... I too give "kudos" to the kuler team for intergrating this feature so well, before i had to use a seperate tool to extract color and then import the scheme which was a real pain in the preverbial :) happy days
 

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