BP4_Kuler

Adobe Kuler is a very good site for anyone who has to choose colors for their design themes; graphic designers, interior designers, or anyone that wants to see how colors go together to create a mood or feeling.

Go to the website (http://kuler.adobe.com) which takes you to a theme window where you have a large selection of color themes.  You can see the highest rated, most popular, random or even type in a word that fits your design concept.  I chose romance and it came up with 340 selections.  I can reduce that number by adding the color rules for the theme.  For example, I want to use only complementary colors. If you do not like any of the themes, you can make your own (even from a photo from flickr™) or change one you have found. 

First selection after search for "romance"
339 more to look at

Once you have selected a theme you click on it and you go to a second window. Here you can manipulate the colors even further. It also gives you all of the numeric color values, so when my students need to know the CMYK numbers to make that color in their brochures or RGB if they need that same color scheme for a website, they have it here. 

Cool Romance is the color scheme I chose

Second window for "Cool Romance"
Here I can adjust the colors or get the color values for each

If you are a registered user you can then save the theme to your own Mykuler space where you can go to any time to view and retrieve the themes you like. If the person using Kuler has any of the CS5 programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.) they can go to the panels within that program, connect to Kuler, find the color scheme they want to use and then add it to their swatches tool within the program. 

I really like this web tool and will start requiring my students to use it to select their colors for their projects.