Wow. We've been working very hard over the last year, months and weeks to make this new site happen... and after a slight delay... We're ready to share it with the world. There are some obvious and not so obvious updates and changes, so I'll give you a little guided tour through some of the big stuff.

Behind the Curtains

While you'll probably notice the look and feel first, we've actually rebuilt the code from the ground up too. So not only do we have a light, open and hopefully more user friendly design... we have a new architecture that will let us scale with the growth of the community and add new robust features that wouldn't have worked on our prior code.

The New Homepage

Welcome home.  The homepage is the first experience a lot of people have with our site and we wanted to make it a bit more user friendly for the first time viewer who may have experienced color overload with the previous site. Lots of people get referred here by a friend who said "if you're looking for great wedding color ideas go to COLOURlovers..." or "you should check out COLOURlovers for web design colors...", but then found a wall of color once they checked out the site.  With our new content channels (wedding, home, fashion, web, print & craft) and their placement on the homepage, we hope new lovers will have an easier time jumping in and sharing the love.

We're also giving our community a showcase further down the homepage.  You can see the latest groups, discussions... and we'll regularly feature one of the amazing people who help make COLOURlovers such a great place.

Color Channels

COLOURlovers come here for personal, creative and professional reasons.  With our new channels, if your passion is jewelry making... you now have a mini-community inside of COLOURlovers for you to read related blog posts, start or participate in crafty discussions and browse related craft groups.  These channels aren't walls inside of the community, but rather different pieces of equipment on the big COLOURlovers playground.

Love It

The old rating system didn't work very well.  What is a 5 heart palette? What's a 2 heart palette?  The work shared on our site is pretty subjective, so trying to standardize a way to rate something on a value scale is very tricky.  What we've moved to is a simple "Love It" voting system.  So if you see something you like... go ahead and love it.  If you see something you don't like... just keep browsing and I'm sure you'll discover something you do.  The votes in our old system got cleared every month to keep a fresh look of what the most popular things were, but that often filled our inboxes on the 1st of the month with worried members that their work had been deleted.  We're now tracking Loves from all time, but also allow you to adjust the time window to this month, this week and today.

Follow What Your Love

Subscriptions & Faves = Follow.  On the previous site you could favorite something, which listed that you loved it.  This led to confusion as to where favorites ended up and how a user could easily go back and view their faves.  We also had a subscribe button that would let you get a love note whenever something occurred around a color, palette, pattern or user... but filled up your inbox with activity updates didn't make the love notes experience very good.

So now you can follow a palette, pattern, color or fellow member and you'll see updates from them in the recent activity in your account page.  Don't want to get updates anymore?  Simply unfollow.

*We know this still leaves a hole where a great favorite / bookmarking system should be and we're working on a solution for that.*

Seamless Pattern Design

I'm very excited to release our new seamless pattern designer tool called "Seamless Studio".  Previously, we had a little over 100 pattern templates for the community to color, and this super creative crowd colored 750,000+ variations of them.  With our new pattern design tool, you're not limited to a fixed set of 100 pattern templates to color... you can now design your own.

To design a pattern, simply drag shapes over from the shapes toolbox and drop them on the canvas.  Once on the canvas, you can resize, rotate, edit & add shapes until you get the perfect pattern.  There's also a layers area to help you arrange, organize and set the default colors for a pattern template.  Then click "Save" to publish your new pattern template to the COLOURlovers library, and let other members color them in.

Leader-boards

So many awesome members and now more ways to give them recognition.  We've changed the wording on what was our user "rating" to "karma" points, and you can still browse these top lovers along with several new options.  See which users have been really active in the last week, see the user who has given the most love in the past month, see what conversational lover has left the most comments since we started, etc.

More Color Trend Tracking

Our trend tracking was getting a little stale... but now we're adding fresh content regularly and we've added a few new trends to track.  We're now tracking Wedding Invitations, Magazines, Street Fashions, Interior Looks & Handmade goods... And in the near future we'll be tracking several more trends and increasing the volume of trend updates.

Fabric & Art On-Demand Partners

We're thrilled to be announcing two great partnerships that will let our users take their color love offline and into the physical world.  All palettes and patterns on the site can now be purchased as Fabric from SpoonFlower.com and Art & Posters from Imagekind.com.  We're really excited to see what kinds of fabric creations our crafty members will come up with.  And how cool would it be to create a palette or pattern on the site, and then be able to hang it as a professional canvas on your wall?  Now you can.

*Not all the previous patterns were given to us with commercial rights, so those can't be purchased.*

Explore. Create. Suggest. Improve.

We built this for you. We took your suggestions over the last couple years and tried our best to evolve the site in a way that creates the best experience for you... that helps more people feel welcomed into our community... and that brings you new tools and creative ways to share the color love.

This is by no means a final product. We're still in the process of flushing out some bugs, we'll be editing and improving things over the next couple weeks... and we want to hear from you how we can continue to grow our community with you.

Happy COLOURloving!
+D