Our friends at HOW have their grand event planned for next month in Boston. This creative conference is one of the biggest I've ever been to and brings in fine people from all over the world. Not only will we be there, we'll be providing a little colorful entertainment with our Palettes in Real Life interactive exhibit. Come join us and a few thousands other creative people for an awesome time! (I'll also be there signing copies of Color Inspirations, and I'd love to have you sign mine!)

Share this Post

Tweet

Register for HOW Design Live using the code "COLOUR" and get $100 of the admission price.

HOW Design Live - Boston
In 2012, Boston is the meeting point for the biggest gathering of designers, freelancers, creative team managers, and other creative professionals in the country. That much creative energy under one roof? It’s a recipe for revolutionary ideas and life-changing inspiration. You’ll rethink your approach to work and life, connect with like-minded allies, hear from creative visionaries, and discover new tools to make your job more satisfying and productive than ever before.

Real Life Color Palettes!

We'd had the pleasure of making palettes in real life with our members a few times, and each time we do it we're impressed with your creativity and energy. We're excited to bring the experience to the weekend fun at HOW Design Live. Find us and make a palette with us! Some photos from our last palette making experience can be viewed below:

Bubs | "Readyforlove" | COLOURlover | @Bubs 

Aaron Epstein | "let there be light" | aepstein | 

Molly Bermea | "Ooga Booga"  | mollybermea @mollybermea

Serafina Bermea | "Goo Goo, Ga Ga" 

Greg Hennes, COLOURlovers Official Photographer | "pink parts are punk" | Greg Hennes

Toti | "Ligero" | @patrullaverde

Gail Towey | "Sorbet" | Martha Stewart

Alice Fisk MacKenzie | "Orange Reality"

See the rest of the Palettes in Real Life from the Color Conference here.

Register for HOW Design Live using the code "COLOUR" and get $100 of the admission price.

When I first started this site 7 years ago, it was a quick and easy decision to call it COLOURlovers: It was all about color for people who loved it. But now with 1.5M members from around the world who have loved, err, liked more than 10,000,000 pieces of shared content... I think we can all agree, that's just too much love!

It's also worth noting that in the current state of the world with ongoing wars, political tension, financial implosions... What the world really doesn't need is more love. That's why I'm super excited to share with you the new & waaaay better COLOURlikers!

It's just like the old COLOURlovers, but now without any of the love. What has love ever done anyway?! You're all probably used to liking things on Facebook anyway, so this should be an easy transition.

Start Sharing the Like!

So go check out the profiles of other likers. Go like some palettes or patterns. Share the like!

Don't worry, we're kidding. Happy April Fools. We still love you.

Life is a fragile thing and it always hurts the heart when somebody passes well before their time. We're deeply saddened by the loss of one of our active, loving, creative & supportive members; sunmeadow. She leaves many friends here in our community and we're incredibly honored to have the privilege to continue hosting & sharing her creations with the world. We may have 1.5 million members now, but every single one is important to me and is greatly appreciated. We love you sunmeadow and thank you for all you shared with us and all the inspiration you will continue to share.

A close friend of hers let me know of the sad news. They also noted that she was a very private person and that she would appreciate her personal details not be shared here. I will respect her wishes and ask you to do the same.

Her last palette randomly created was entitled "Wings To Fly" and I believe she has them now. I can't possibly honor all that she shared here with us in one post, but I'll share some of her most popular creations below... and please feel free to share yours in the comments.

Sunmeadow: Colors | Palettes | Patterns | Templates

Sunmeadow also created hundreds of beautiful pattern templates. Here are just some of them:

Thank you Sunmeadow. Rest in peace.

It's that time of year again where we look back on the colors that helped us define a year and look forward to the new colors that will help us paint a beautiful future. We had nearly 1,000 people create their own personal Color of the Year in 2011 and below we'll look at what trends emerged.

Share this Post

Tweet

Now that we've done this for two years it's interesting to see the change in colors and the words we use to describe our year. As can be expected, love was the most popular word used to describe your colors. And the top 4 words our community chose for 2011 "Love, Hope, Happy, Fun" were almost the same as last year's "Love, Happy, New Hope." Reds have been the most popular color both years, but 2011's colors are more cooler with more blue, teal, and purple shades.

As always we want to know what you see as the color of the year. We each see the world uniquely and we're here to help you share that wonderful perspective of yours. You can help us shape next year's graphic by naming your own Color of the Year for 2012: www.ColorOfTheYear.com

Nearly 1,000 people from around the world told us their colors of the year for 2011... Here are the people's colors of the year:

(Click for Full Screen View)

Look Back at the Color of the Year 2010

Want to see how things have changed since our graphic last year? Check out the Colors of the Year 2010 here.

Comic Sans is installed more on PCs. Why so serious Linux & Mac? That's just one of the many things we discovered while looking into the creative history of typography aka fonts. They play a huge part in branding and logos. They bring us the words in the stories we read. They add personality to a message. ... and with CreativeMarket.com, our new marketplace for beautiful design content like fonts launching soon, we wanted to bring the typographic history, usage & character to life. Get your typographic love on!

Share this Post

Tweet

P.S. How many different font faces can you name off the top of your head?

Design with love by Meghan Robichaud

With the launch of our design content marketplace, CreativeMarket.com coming soon we thought it would be fun to take a look at the most popular design elements in movie posters from 2011. After all, it's the carefully & creatively designed marketing materials for the movies are what get us to the theater.
(honestly, the best selling designs at the movie theater these days are the concessions stands... $6 for a bottle of water?!) The designers capture our attention, but the real success of a blockbuster movie will be determined by the quality of the film itself (not including #4 on the list below)... Let's take a look.

Share this Post

Tweet

What Will 2012 Bring?

What movie are you most excited about for 2012? What design elements do you think will dominate this year?

I'm very excited to announce CreativeMarket.com, a new kind of marketplace for handcrafted, mousemade design content powered by a global community of creative people... just like you!

Share this Post

Tweet

We have a simple, but important company mission: to make beautiful design simple & accessible to everyone.

This mission is something we've been passionately living here at COLOURlovers for the last 7 years. We started by building the world's best color community & creative inspiration site. By curating a supportive community for ideas to be shared and inspiration to be found, we've jump-started a massive amount of creative projects.

We then started building design tools like ColorSchemer and Seamless Studio that were simple & intuitive, but powerful & professional. These tools provide expert capabilities to novice creatives, and help them develop their skills.

Creative Market is the next piece of our mission that will help creatives easily access a wealth of beautiful design content for their projects. Whether it's finding a unique vector pattern for a textile, the perfect font with personality for a new logo, or any other kind of digital creative content that helps you produce something amazing.

Our friends at Etsy.com empowered the handmade goods revolution. We believe we can do the same for mousemade goods. Grab your creative tools and join us!
Click here to sign up for early access and get $5 free credit.

What It Means for COLOURlovers

We've helped a few members sell the patterns they've created here at COLOURlovers and it's an amazing feeling to give somebody access to tools and a platform so they can make some money doing what they love. I get stoked when I think about the day when one of your full-time jobs is simply being a COLOURlover. We've wanted to make it easier for members to sell their creative works, but not to over-commercialize the COLOURlovers site. We started building commercial tools into the site, but we realized the best thing for both COLOURlovers & CreativeMarket was to let them tell their own stories... in the best way they can.
COLOURlovers is a creation & inspiration community.
CreativeMarket is a marketplace for awesome design content.

They obviously work very well together, but by separating the sites we don't have to worry about commercializing COLOURlovers too much. We're very conscious of how special this place is. We can make CreativeMarket the best marketplace for finding, buying, selling & sharing the most unique and beautiful design content. And we'll make it super easy for COLOURlovers members to participate in the CreativeMarket if they want to.

You all have already created tens of thousands of beautiful patterns and unique shapes that are valuable, but we'll also be including other creative content types that designers need like Fonts, Photoshop Brushes, Gradients, Photos and more. We'll continue to make design software & apps that help you create the content that will be sold in the marketplace. We believe we can make the creation process for all of these kinds of creative content as simple & intuitive as we've done with our other apps.

I've seen how amazingly talented you all are, and I know that helping you make a living through your passion is how we can best live our mission.

Do You have Digital Content to Sell?

Are you a designer with beautiful vector shapes & patterns, fonts, brushes, photos, icons or other creative content you would love to sell in the Creative Market? Be one of the first publishers in our marketplace and let us promote your work to millions of people.

Contact Us to be one of our first publishers →

Thank you so much for the support, creativity & love over the past 7 years. We hope our new marketplace can reward you for all your hard work... Thanks for sharing the love.
+B

I'm continually amazed by the community you've all helped create here at COLOURlovers. We continually have one of the top communities on the web as noted by the Webby Awards (5x in a row!) and the atmosphere is one of support and creativity. In an age when it's so easy to put somebody else down anonymously online, you all keep sharing the love. Thank you.

And to support the awesome culture we have here, I wanted to develop a Community Agreement that we can show to new members & old that helps them understand what it means to be a member of this community. Below is my first draft at this, but this is for the community so I would love your feedback and thoughts too.

Part of the reason to write this is to help you all better understand, appreciate and support each other. I stay very connected to the community and find myself mediating more misunderstandings and disagreements than I probably need to. By creating an agreement for how we expect each other to act here, we'll make it easier for the community to help take care of itself.

COLOURlovers Community Agreement

Welcome to one of the best communities in the known universe. A place for sharing your creative ideas in a supportive & inspiring atmosphere. The following agreement is an outline of what we all expect of each other here at COLOURlovers. Please have a read of it and then continue sharing the COLOURlove.

What this community is all about.

This community is about creativity and inspiration. While color is at the foundation and heart of our community, it is much more than that. We want to continue to create the tools and platforms for everybody to discover their inner creative talent and to share it with the world. We recognize that each person has a unique perspective of the world and we encourage them to share it. By participating in the COLOURlovers community we hope everyone discovers more of their talents and helps somebody else discover theirs.

Our community is about: love, support, creativity, inspiration, sharing & inclusion.

Our community is NOT about: hate, hurting, attacking, criticizing & exclusion.

Some Participation Tips:

Constructive Criticism
It's ok to not love everything. It's fine to dislike a color, palette or pattern... but sharing your dislike in an attacking way won't be tolerated in our community. Saying something like "this palette sucks" will get your comment removed by and admin and possibly your account banned if you continue to attack the creations of other members. What you could say instead if you really have to comment on something you dislike is "I don't like this combination of colors." Or better yet, be specific why... but keep in mind, some people are sharing for the creative joy of it, not to get critical feedback. And if all else fails remember the old saying of "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."

How to Address Problems
First, please try err on the side of assuming people are good. If it looks like somebody is being rude to another member or copying the work of another member without crediting them, ask them about it. Don't make accusations. Ask for more information. Most problems can be mediated when more information is gathered. The person who was "stealing" palettes and not crediting the original creator was simply a new member who didn't know how to bookmark them and they didn't want to lose them. The person being rude didn't understand a joke that was written without the full context. Assume people are good, and ask questions. Most problems can be solved nicely that way.

If you can't get more information to help mediate a problem or somebody is being flagrantly rude to other members. Please contact one of the COLOURlovers team members. You can do so by using the contact link at the bottom right of the page, or by sending any one of the team members a love note.

Closed Accounts
There are a few reasons why accounts may be closed. Sometimes it just means a member wanted to move in another direction with their life and they closed their own account. Other times account are closed for spamming or attacking other members.

Adult Language & Content
Swearing is generally called "adult language" but that doesn't mean that all adults swear or that they appreciate it. We have a swear word filter turned on by default to block the display of certain words. If you really enjoy a well placed f-bomb then you can turn that preference off in your account settings area.

Pornographic content isn't allowed on COLOURlovers. Some content exists in a gray area of artful nudity. There are members of all ages on this site, so try and be considerate of all of them when posting images that would be considered adult in nature. If they can't show it on television then there is a good chance it shouldn't be showed here.

Rights Violations
Again, please err on the side of assuming that another member didn't have malicious intentions if you come across something that looks like it violates the content rights of another person. On all content created with COLOURlovers we have rights settings that allow for different kinds of usage of that content. We expect all members to respect those rights. If you use content in COLOURlovers creations that are from outside of COLOURlovers, please property credit the source and only use content in the way that it is allowed under it's license.

If you would like to report a rights violation, please use the contact form and we'll look into it immediately.

Spam
We really don't like spam. Members caught spamming the site will have their accounts removed and their IPs banned. Spamming can be interpreted as heavily promoting something without adding much value. It's ok to promote and link to other content on your profile page and in the bio of your creations, but promoting links in comments that provide no contextual value will be flagged as spam. If you really have a hard time figuring out what an appropriate balance is between adding value & promoting... an acceptable ratio would be 100/1. ie, add value 100 times for every time you promote something.

You can report spam comments by clicking the red ! in the top right of any comment block. The team will review the flagged comment immediately.

Multiple Accounts
It is allowed for a single person to have multiple accounts on COLOURlovers so long as those other accounts are not used to game the site or mislead other members. Accounts that look to have suspicious activity will be looked into and possibly closed.

Love Notes
Love Notes are the in-site direct messages on COLOURlovers. You can send a Love Note to any other members directly. While this is a private area of the site, be careful about what information you share in Love Notes as there is no restrictions on the recipient sharing the information publicly.

Personal Disagreements
The world is a big place and we have members from every corner of it. With such a diverse group of people there are sure to be some times when two members simply don't get along with each other. Until more features get built to help members block/ignore members they disagree with, please simply do your best to ignore other members that upset you. And if a member has respectfully asked you to ignore them and leave them alone, please honor their request.

-----------------------------------------------

Does this sound like a good agreement for our community? Does it cover everything that might be confusing about how to participate here in a positive & supportive way?

I often hear COLOURlovers described as a place to help people find great colors... "Like for when you're looking for colors to paint your kitchen or bedroom." Problem is, it has been hard to take a color on our site and find a matching paint color in the real world.

So, we're super excited to announce a partnership with Martha Stewart Living™ to get her paint colors on the millions of colors, palettes & patterns pages here at COLOURlovers... By far making this site the biggest color resource for paint color inspiration!

Share this Post

Tweet

I've had the pleasure of spending some time at the Martha Stewart HQ in New York city and it's like Santa's workshop for creatives. Each room is full of people making awesome stuff... pastries in this room, ornaments in that room... It's the kind of place any creative/crafty person dreams of being locked in over night. Since Martha Stewart and her creative empire are all about crafting & creating... we're thrilled to work with her and all the awesome people at MSLO. The addition of these paints to the site is going to open so many great opportunities for interior designers & decorators, and even just somebody looking to add some pop to a boring white wall.

Finding the Paint Colors Your Love

Wherever a color is displayed on our site, along with the HEX & RGB numbers for that color we'll also show you the closest matching Martha Stewart Living paint color. And every display of that paint color will link you to the Home Depot site where the Martha Stewart Living paints are exclusively sold. From the Home Depot site you can easily & affordably try out a paint tester to make sure you love the color.

Note on Color Matching: Since more colors (16 Million) can exist on a computer screen compared to paint colors... Not every color on our site will be a perfect match to a paint color, but we're working hard on perfecting the matching logic so the color that you're loving here can be the color you're loving on your walls.

Martha Stewart’s 280 custom colors are inspired by themes found in nature and the home. Martha Stewart Living also supports the entire decorating project through an innovative color coordination system. Symbols match color families and themes, and coordinate with other household products throughout the store like rugs, furniture, and storage.

Colorful Story Telling with Paint

Along with adding the paint colors to the site, we'll be showcasing some of the beautiful home images from Martha Stewart in our Home Inspirations & Trends section of our site as well as some write-ups here in the blog. Having the ability to link colors we love to paint colors is really going to add a whole new layer of awesome to the site!

Paint Your Space. Share It With the World!

When you use this new feature to paint a wall in one of the spaces in which you live, make sure you post up a picture in the comments. We'll be showcasing a gallery of awesome painted spaces soon and I hope yours will be included.

I can't even count the number of hours I've logged on different consoles since I was a kid... it's in the thousands for sure. From my early years saving the princess and beating Ganon to getting headshots and fragging noobs, as I've grown up, so have the technologies that power the video game experience.

Share this Post

Tweet

With the changes in technology have come richer visual experiences. Starting with only a few dozen colors in the first systems to millions of colors in our current ones. We're at the end of one generation now... What awesome new ways to play are coming next?

Our current generation of video game consoles (xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 3) is the 7th generation, with the first starting in the 1970s. A lot can happen in several generations! If you think about generations in human terms (in the US it's around 25 years) then video games have been around since the early 1800s... and way back then we were just getting some technologies like the automated printing press, the first photo and first telegraph. In a way those early technologies helped us end up with the visual, connected video games we have today.

Let's take a look at the colorful history of video games... ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A select start!

 
What was your favorite video game? Remember what the color palette was like? Show us.