Info 202 Fall 2011

Have you ever had
school or work projects that involve a huge amount of design work? Have you
been bothered by the choice of color themes? Color theme is an important component
of website design or other types of design because it coveys the ethos and
theme of the subject. Color picking tools are ubiquitous on the web and many of
them provide users with interactions by using color wheels or color tables that
have clickable grids.  However, there has
not been a revolutionary online color-organizing community that allows you to generate
and tag your own color theme, and share, save, download color themes created by
other community members until the birth of Adobe Kuler (software as service). It
is really cool.

Using Adobe Kuler, colors
are organized as a collection of resources that has the creator’s unique
personality. Users can create their own color themes either from colors or from
images. If they create from colors, they can select a rule among “Analogous”,
Monochromatic,” “Triad,” and four others. If from images, Kuler will give users
options on uploading a photo or connecting to Flickr, grabbing an inspiring
photo. After a certain color theme is crated, users can give the theme a title,
and tag the theme with words they think are relevant. For example, if a user
creates a color theme titled “Sea,” she/he might tag the theme as “blue, water.”
 A color theme can be saved or
downloaded, and the user has the right to make it public or private only.

Kulers also let
users search and use the color themes that are already created by other contributors.
The public themes are categorized into “Newest,” “Most Popular,” “Highest
rated,” and “Random.” Each of the public themes has a ranking and other people
can leave comments under a color theme. “MyKuler” functions as a personal color
themes storage center where all the private color themes are stored. “Pulse” is
a data visualization experiment conducted by Kuler where users can see the popularity
of different color themes in different countries over different time span
through histograms and dots.

 Any color-lovers,
professional designers, or people who are interested in design can create and
share their color themes anywhere, anytime online. Via Adobe Kuler, colors are organized
not only by its inherent attributes such as “warm” and “color, ” but also the
semantic meanings a series of colors can covey. For example, users can name and
tag their color themes using vocabularies that describe the emotions and of the
colors. Tagging is a powerful tool of metadata.  Kuler also serves as an online social
networking community where people can communicate with each other though
ranking and commenting. Kuler also provides users with external links to
outside design websites that would help on design projects. Kuler is indeed a “Color
Theme 2.0” or color online management tool.

 http://kuler.adobe.com/

(For more functionalities, you will need to an Adobe account to sign in.)